Steve’s Blog

I applied to speak at WordCamp Miami in 2015 and again in 2016.

Last year, I was lucky and got accepted.

This year, I was lucky and didn’t get accepted. Continue reading “How to Win Friends and Influence People: WordCamp Miami Edition”

Last Christmas, I got a Fitbit as a gift.

This Christmas, I got an email saying that my 4th Fitbit has shipped.

The devices were great and the customer support was excellent, but the devices were just fragile.

That pretty much sums up my experience with wearables in 2015: I use them all the time and they break all the time. Continue reading “My love / hate relationship with wearables”

All the focus on WordPress’ new desktop app has been about its use of Javascript.

I think that’s missing the bigger picture.

Brian Krogsgard’s Post Status newsletter has an interesting quote from Matt Terenzio: Continue reading “To see the future of WordPress, click Reader”

Take a brief look at the web today and you might think open source has a lot of influence:

• Swift is open source, from Apple.
• HHVM is open source, from Facebook.
• Android is open source, from Google.
• Bootstrap is open source, from Twitter.
• .Net is open source from Microsoft.

Continue reading “Open source has reach, but no influence”

Welcome to my #firstworldproblems post.

I make a good living, sitting At my desk all day. I can take breaks at any time and eat whatever I want.

I’ve nothing to complain about except a lack of self-discipline. That freedom to eat has been trouble. Continue reading “218”

Amongst all the news of the European refugee crisis, one snippet stood out to me:

"When I was a child I was a refugee" Austrians meet Syrians. You don't want to miss @JamesEReynolds story 6:45pm BBC1 pic.twitter.com/DuFgEhr2ke

— Julia Macfarlane 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🇮🇩 (@juliamacfarlane) August 29, 2015

Continue reading “40 Million European Refugees”

10 years ago, I was standing in a classroom on the north side of Atlanta, Georgia.

My job was teaching English to the children from Central America whose parents had flocked to Atlanta, looking for construction jobs during the enormous housing boom.

I found out about Joomla’s arrival while sitting at my desk, grading papers during a lunch break.

The growth of Joomla gave me the confidence to start my own business. Joomla allowed me to work from home and see our two children (now 4 and 5) grow up.

The majority of our business today is not Joomla-related, but Joomla is where it all started.

When Joomla’s 5th birthday arrived, I wrote a post for Joomla.org called Thank You.

Now that Joomla’s 10th birthday has arrived, let me say “Thank You” again.

This week, Adobe released a new set of stats about ad blocking. These were the headline figures:

• Globally, the use of ad blocking software grew by 41% year over year.
• Usage in the United States grew 48% during the past year and Europe grew by 35%.

Continue reading “How the Adblocking explosion is impacting our business”

This is a fascinating use of Slack, via Michael Strickland. The NYTimes used Slack to write, edit and publish a live blog of last night’s Republican debate.

They wrote a Chrome plugin to connect a Slack channel directly to their CMS. Continue reading “Slack as a blogging platform at the New York Times”

Back in 2007, Joomla.org decided to stop listing any software that used license keys. They did this because they believed that license keys were incompatible with the GPL license.

Fast forward to 2015 and many (most?) commercial WordPress plugins now use license keys. Some of these license keys just provide access to updates and support – those aren’t the issue here.

However, some license keys lock down the software to a single domain, disabling the plugin even on test sites and localhost installs.

Does this use of license keys violate the GPL? Continue reading “Can your GPL software use license keys?”