The last few months I’ve discovered I’m not quite batman. Besides the fact that I’m not a crime-fighting billionaire (who knew, right?), I also suck at juggling between a working life at night and a social life during the day-time. Even though I also have my batcave (office) in my home, I’ve found out that working at night continuously is not for me.
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So you’re calling your scripts / styles directly in your themes head/footer or straight into your plugins? Well isn’t that cute… but it’s WRONG! If you develop WordPress themes or plugins on a regular basis you should know how to call scripts and styles the proper WP way as well as your parents birthday (maybe not by head, but the answer shouldn’t be more than 2 clicks away). There are loads of tutorials available on this topic but as it’s been done wrong so much I thought another small write-up wouldn’t hurt!
If you think about it, coding for the web is quite an insane process: Write some code, (safe it), switch to the browser, refresh the browser, check results, switch back to your editor, write more code. It’s much like painting in the dark, where you’d have to get up from your desk and switch on the light every time you want to see your progress. The longer you stay in the dark, the harder it is to imagine what the result will look like. As far as I know, painting in the dark isn’t a very popular technique. Yet countless of developers are still writing their code ‘blind’. Well you don’t have to, and you shouldn’t!
Finishing a WordPress project is one thing, maintaining it is a whole other ballgame! When you’ve got 20+ WordPress websites up and running, keeping all of them and their plugins up-to-date is a b*tch! My update process used to be: Open all sites in new tabs, log-in to the first, update, evaluate and go on to the next. Depending if something went wrong or not I could spend hours updating my sites. Hours I could spend working on new projects or updating my own skills instead! In a quest to avoid this process I came across ManageWP, which now is one of my favourite time-saving tools in my arsenal!
On my regular Google quests for answers to some of my development problems I’ve been encountering more and more articles raving about SASS, LESS and other CSS Pre-processors. Like many developers I’ve been actively sticking my head into the sand whenever I hear about pre-processors because it all seems like such a hassle. I already know my CSS well, why overcomplicate things with an extra layer between myself and the actual code? Also, getting it installed seems like quite an effort, also, I’m too busy with my current projects and more excuses like that.
This is the picture of myself I found on the website of the well known UK newspaper The Guardian a couple of weeks back (check out the full article). I thought it was hilarious to see myself accompanying an article on the dangers of wi-fi signals. I also found it to be a tad worrying as I never really intended to have my goofy self-portraits spread out over the internet like that! So how did I go from being a normal young guy to a paranoid celebrity conspiracy theorist? I owe it all to Creative Commons!
The Cuidad de las artes y Ciencias or City of arts and Science in Valencia must be one of the most magnificent collections of architecture that I’ve ever witnessed! During a recent trip to the laid-back city of Valencia, Spain I had the joy of walking around there for an hour or so to take a few shots. I could easily pass a week shooting at this magnificent complex, but somehow I think my girlfriend wouldn’t have enjoyed that. It’s an impressive collection of buildings and if it wasn’t for the 10.000 other photographers and tourists, you’d probably feel like walking straight into the future on entering the complex. It’s unlike anything we’ve got in Amsterdam, except maybe the Eye Film museum, but on its own it fails to impress as much as the outer-space setting from the City of arts and Science. In the short time there I took almost 90 shots, and I haven’t even been inside anything. I hope you enjoy the photos!
A few weeks ago I visited the ‘Eye’ film-museum in Amsterdam for the first time. They started off with an impressive exhibition on Stanley Kubrick, the movie director famous for films as A Clockwork Orange, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Shining and Full Metal Jacket. As those are all films that have had their influence on me somewhere in my youth, I had to see this.
Some of my photography work has been exhibted at the Traces exhibition alongside talented photographers Eavan Aiken and Olivier Moron. This took place at Canvas op de 7e in Amsterdam. The exhibition is already gone now, so here are the pictures that were exhibited there.
As I’ve made quite a few timelapse and stop-motion video’s, Ives One asked me to help him out with a commercial assignment for a Dutch telecommunications company. It took us 5 days of shooting, loads of paint, patience and a full day of editing. We’re quite happy with the result though!