Jeff Sayre's Blog, page 7

Regaining Control of Privacy and Identity: It's up to Each Individual

This is a follow-up post to my article, Privacy in the Facebook Era. It was originally a reply to a comment by Chris Messina in that post. As this topic continues to be relevant, I've decided to extract my comment from that post, revise it, add to it, and turn it into an article.

Personal freedoms, control over one's privacy, and the ability to manage one's identity on the Web have never been in more jeopardy. With Facebook's continued war on personal privacy, the day when a user no longer...

Introducing WordPress Hook Sniffer: a Developer Plugin

As a developer, one of the benefits to sophisticated Open Source projects like WordPress and BuddyPress is that a significant amount of foundational code is already in place. This makes adding additional functionality, additional value, to the platform easier. You just create a plugin.

As a developer, one of the downsides to Open Source projects like WordPress and BuddyPress is that a significant amount of foundational code is already in place. There are hundreds of functions, classes...

WordPress Hooks, Barbs, and Snags

This article is intended to help you learn how to interpret the output from the WordPress Hook Sniffer developer's tool

This article is my exhaustive study of what I thought was a simple little function—the do_action function. It details how WordPress action hooks really work. It is a long, detailed article. If you want to understanding the inner works of the do_action function, then it will be worth your time. Although this article only briefly mentions the apply_filters function, the...

Crap, GPL Questions Once Again

Recently, someone sent me a private message on the BuddyPress.org community network. They had joined WPMU DEV and acquired all of their premium plugins. They wanted to know it they could, "release those plugins all to the buddypress / wp mu community without consequences."

I wrote a response but decided to share it here as I periodically receive similar DMs, PMs, and emails. So, the next time that someone asks my opinion on this issue, I can simply point them to this post and be done with it.

A...

Easy Code to Show Your Most Recent Tweets in WordPress

I've been reworking my website today and decided it was time to add a recent Twitter tweet to the front page. I checked out the Twitter widget and several (of the many) WordPress plugins that display your most recent tweets, but decided that they had a few issues.

I went looking for a solution. The result, 15 lines of PHP you can use to accomplish the goal. No need to mess with plugins. Instead, you pull your tweets from your own Twitter RSS feed using the simpler Twitter Search API, not the T...

Nosquare and Nowalla: Polluting the Stream

Location-based services are great. But please stop sending updates (check ins) to your Twitter and Facebook accounts. It is the perfect example of social-networking tie-in gone wrong.

Why do I say this? It's simple. For those of us that are hundreds or thousands of miles away–which could be many of your followers–tweeting your current location provides zero value. In fact, it is a (big) waste of your followers' time.

In a recent article, I stated this:

…for absolutely every person I currently...

A Flock of Twitters: Decentralized Semantic Microblogging

In my last article, Flocking To the Stream, I ended with this thought about the growing issue of social-networking fatigue:

…as the number of streams continue to increase and as the flow rate of each stream picks up, people will grow tired of having to subscribe to, having to join yet-another-stream phenomenon (YASP). Does the Web truly need additional stream providers each with their own data silos? Is there a user-centric solution to this rapidly growing, overflowing-stream issue that puts...

Flocking To the Stream

I recently began to go through some article backlogs on the websites of various people whose thoughts and perspectives I want to understand better. One such person with whom I'm trying to play catch up is Nova Spivack. If you don't follow Nova then I suggest taking the time to remedy that egregious error.

Since I'm basically working through Nova's article archive in reverse chronological order, it may very well be that in the future, I'll scribe thoughts on some of his even older ruminations. ...