Sillybean

WordPress Hidden Gems (OpenCa.mp presentation) on Slideshare

My presentation for OpenCa.mp this afternoon, WordPress Hidden Gems, is up on Slideshare. I’ll fill in some slide notes later, since it’s mostly screenshots and there’s much text in the transcript. Enjoy!

Good pizza

We’ve had good luck with Smitten Kitchen recipes lately. The scalloped tomatoes were so good we made them twice more — Michael especially likes the breakfast suggestion with the egg — and the cheddar biscuits were pretty great. So this weekend I wanted to find a good pizza sauce recipe. Our plain tomato sauce is amazing, but didn’t have enough kick to work well as a pizza sauce.

So, when I saw recipes for pizza sauce and dough on Smitten that originally came from Mario Batali, I figured they were worth a shot. And Michael came home with two huge bunches of asparagus the other day (one white, one green), so I thought we’d try the asparagus pizza too. We recruited a couple friends to help with the baking and the eating, and… well, NOM. We were a little short on mozzarella, but we grated some white cheddar to fill in, and that made a great combination. For the sauce, I decided to start with canned peeled tomatoes, since it’s already getting hard to find good fresh ones. That worked; I just let it cook down while we waited for the dough to rise. I kept adding red pepper flakes to make the sauce spicier. (I wasn’t kidding about wanting a kick. Michael: “Who are you, and what have you done with my wife?”)

Our guests brought peaches that were a little underripe, so they fixed that by caramelizing them with butter and brown sugar, and we dumped them over the fresh batch of vanilla ice cream I’d just put in the freezer.

August events [updated]

I’ll be speaking at WordCamp Houston this Saturday. (It’s sold out, but HostGator is giving away a few more tickets this morning, so hurry over there if you want them!) My topic is WordPress as a CMS. Hint: WordPress IS a CMS. It’s all in how you approach your content! I’ll talk about the way I’ve set up WP for all my day-job sites as well as a few freelance clients, and I’ll go over some of the code examples from the book. Change of plans! Someone working on the schedule realized that Bill and I had been given the same topic, so I’ll do an overview of the new features in 3.0 instead.

At the end of the month, I’m speaking at OpenCamp Dallas on the hidden gems of WordPress. When I showed early drafts of my content management and theme chapters to some friends, I got several “I didn’t know that!” responses from people who’d been using WordPress for years, so I think this session will be helpful for newbies and pros alike.

And coming up soon, I’ll be hosting a webinar on custom content types and taxonomies in 3.0 for HigherEdExperts.com. We’ve just decided to reschedule this, so I’ll post the registration details when we set the new date.

Oh, joy.

August’s weather has arrived, right on time.

a Dodocase-compatible iPad stand

While I love my Dodocase, it doesn’t work as a stand on all surfaces. I wanted something lightweight that I could throw into my bag, but I didn’t want to have to pry the iPad out of the case all the time — the Dodo is snug.

I went prowling in Office Max to see if one of their business card holders would work. They didn’t have any I liked, but they did have some sign holders on clearance. At 2-for-1, I figured I could afford to mess with them.

I bought the 5″x7″ version of this Rolodex sign holder, although I suspect the wooden base is the same and the only difference is the plastic piece. I tossed out the plastic part and handed the base to Michael, who disappeared into the garage for a while and returned, covered in sawdust, to show me what he’d wrought: a widened groove that holds the narrow end of the Dodo.