Having to include an entire PHP OAuth library every time I want to make a simple API request for some of my own data from a 3rd party app like Twitter really pisses me off. Perhaps this is unreasonable, but it’s a problem I ran into for the 4th or 5th time today when trying to help John O’Nolan fetch his status count for his blog.

Despite the current economic turmoil, many people are warning that the technology market is falling foul of another bubble. I’ve been following the discussion with fascination, and last week this article from TNW debunking the theory really caught my eye. This is not another technology bubble, this is natural economic growth resulting from the real world adoption of new technologies that is (finally) starting to happen.

If you work with multiple environments (development, staging, production etc) when building WordPress sites, you’ll know that WordPress uses hardcoded absolute URLs in the database for various tasks. There are lots of arguments as to why this is done, and whether it’s the best solution, but for now it remains quite difficult to migrate WordPress between environments.

Back in June I posted about tidying up the WordPress admin dashboard. Recently I got a comment on that article asking if the admin menu could be altered for different users in a similar way. This turned out to be ever-so-slightly more complicated that I expected because there is no way to distinguish between the permission to edit and the permission to add a page or post. However, like most things in WordPress with a bit of graft it’s usually possible!

Code Example: You can download the complete code sample with comments right here: functions.php [ZIP File]

Technology conferences are fun, an enormous amount of extremely geeky fun. Most folks can’t wait to get home and blog about all the wonderful things they’ve seen, heard and learnt over the duration of the conference. Those reviews are great insights into what works and what doesn’t, but are they an accurate reflection of the long-term benefits web industry professionals can gain from attending conferences?

Two months on and I’m still reeling from my single day experience of the Future of Web Design Conference. I shared a ticket with colleague and so attended the party & second day of the conference, having the chance to meet some awesome people and learn a great deal. I highly recommend attending the FOWD conference and these are my reasons why.

Last week marked the launch of the 7th ExplicitWeb podcast, complete with our second guest, Rick Nunn. The show seems to be gathering strength with each new episode and I thought it about time I shared my thoughts. If you haven’t heard the podcast yet, I recommend checking us out either at the ExplicitWeb site or our page on iTunes.

Just a quick post on the origins of the podcast, the idea behind it and why it is the way it is!