Tweeting is nice because it’s terse; I can update my tweeps about what I’m doing, resources I’ve discovered and articles I’ve read between more lengthy and media-rich blog posts (and to publicize those posts).

The Twitter Tools plugin is a great way to integrate tweets into a WordPress blog. The most obvious benefit of this is that it keeps the content on the blog page fresh and allows bloggers to communicate bitlets of information that do not require their own post.

In addition to other worthwhile features, Twitter Tools allows a blog admin to display recent tweets in a sidebar widget, and to automatically publish tweets in a daily or weekly digest format. Twitter Tools caches tweets in a table of the WordPress database to reduce the number of calls to Twitter.

There were a few things about the plugin I didn’t particularly like out of the box. First, there was a link below the last tweet in the sidebar widget to take a visitor to my Twitter page. I prefer to have the widget title be that link. Second, the digest post title date format was ugly: “2009-06-29″ instead of “June 29, 2009″. Third, the link at the end of each tweet in the digest post had a simple ‘#’ instead of the date and time of the tweet, which also serves as a link to the original tweet.

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development · php · plugin · programming · social networking · twitter · wordpress

Inside the baby mind
Jonah Lehrer, Boston Globe, April 26, 2009

This fascinating article discusses recent discoveries scientists have made about the brains of babies. Babies–surprise, surprise–are easily distracted. What I did not know is that toddlers learn 10 new words every day and that, “it typically takes significantly higher concentrations of anesthesia to render babies unconscious, since there’s more cellular activity to silence.”

Adults, I learned, are not better than babies at paying attention. The opposite is true; adults are better able to ignore the periphery while children digest a broader spectrum of sensory inputs.

This new understanding of baby cognition, and the peculiar ways in which babies pay attention, is also giving scientists insights into improving the mental functioning of adults. The ability to direct attention, it turns out, doesn’t merely inhibit irrelevant facts and perceptions – it can also stifle the imagination. Sometimes, the mind performs best when we don’t try to control it.

If we could learn to temporarily shelve our focus and allow our minds to wander like a child, keenly attuned to the world around us, we might be able to reach a level of consciousness that would permit us to discover creative solutions to perplexing problems.

At such moments, she suggests, we need to think with the innocence of an infant – to release the reins of attention and look anew at a world we’re still trying to understand.

baby · boston globe · brain · child · development · intelligence · learning · neurology · psychology · toddler

From a Justin Russell tweet.

coder · development · interview · job · programmer · web

Replace Microsoft Notepad With Latest Notepad++ v5.0 in Windows

With this fix my favorite little text editor, Notepad++, is now my default Windows text editor.

I love this quote on the The Ultimate Web Developer’s Christmas Wish List post on the Smashing Magazine blog.

Please notice: if a web-developer uses Notepad++, a robust freeware editor for Windows users, he or she will be very unlikely to switch to one of the above mentioned applications.

LOL.

development · editor · free · notepad++ · open source · programming

Everybody knows what a lamp is, but how many have ever heard of a wamp?

For years I used one distribution of Linux or another as my primary operating system and mostly loved it. But Gimp isn’t Photoshop and I was tired of using my laptop to manage and edit my photo library. Photoshop CS3 and Lightroom are the programs I use most after Firefox. So I’m back to Windows XP on the desktop. *sigh*

I’ve been developing in Notepad++ lately and love it! The syntax highlighting and FTP functionality make it a wonderful environment. All I have to do is connect to the server, double-click the file to edit, make the modifications and save. The file is automatically uploaded back to the server and immediately available. It is wonderful.

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apache · development · environment · linux · mysql · php · programming · web · webdev · windows