Just read the latest article at Fuel your Interface entitled “Three Big Mistakes that Can Make or Break your Design Career.” Super informative; one of the three tips were to never sit around waiting for work to come – go find it! In this day of social media, personal branding, and transparency, there’s no reason to wait for anything. Go out and get it!

The third tip was to not stretch yourself thin. I’ve personally committed this foul many a time. And everytime, it results in me stressing out, having a lesser quality of life (dramatic, but serious), and most importantly, my work suffers in one of two ways: It’s either terribly late or not as good as it can be. And both of those are unacceptable flaws; so don’t ever take more work than you personally can handle! Try to find someone who you can outsource work to; they may come back to you with work just when you need and don’t expect it.

But the second tip really interested me. Jokingly, it’s referred to as the “Garmon principle” – Garmon being some friend of the author (sorry to belittle your existence, dude named Garmon). From the article:

The first thing you should do is close your laptop, put away your cool bag of tricks, and think. Think, “What would be the perfect site for this? What would it look like? If there were no boundaries, what is the coolest thing, or the most functional way, to make this happen?” Also think, “What will make this worth existing as much or more than the next guy’s interface?” Once you have decided what the best possible solution would be, figure out how to do it. If there is something in your original idea that just simply isn’t possible, then amend it. “Re-idea,” if you will. But never, ever, EVER sit down and start doing things simply because you know how to do them. Because the truth is, no one really cares how much you know about coding or development. The people who are looking at this site aren’t thinking about what it took to make it, or how many advanced lines of code you wrote. They’re thinking about how it is now, as a whole.

So much sense! My feedback after the jump.

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So recently a client had me upgrade their copy of WordPress from 2.6.something to the latest 2.8.4. Things went fine; themes and plugins didn’t need updating, but the next day I got an email complaning about how the posts weren’t publishing at the times they were set to, and were returning a status in the admin as “missed schedule.”

It took me a LONG time to figure this one out. And I didn’t really figure shit out, but finally found the appropo hack at this forum. Just reposting what you gotta do to get this working; for some reason it’s not posted everywhere. There are some other ways of correcting what’s going on; but if you don’t have root access to your hosting server like I don’t, you gotta figure out a way to make it work with just code. Here’s a line that’ll do it for you; place it in your wp-config.php file.

- Taken from Otto32′s comment on the wordpress forum, check it out for a great explanation or read my shittier one below:

Basically, there’s a file called wp-cron.php that’s called everytime wordpress loads, and runs anything that’s scheduled; from the future planning of posts to some plugins that use the schedule feature. Every time someone hits your blog, if it’s been a long enough time since it’s last run, wordpress sends a request to wp-cron.php.

If the posts aren’t publishing, it may be the way your server is reacting to an HTTP request from itself. So you ahve to use a different type of request, by putting the above code into your wp-config.php. There are ways to alter your server to accept requests from itself; but for my client, I didn’t have root access, and only could edit the wordpress code itself. So this fix is certainly better than others.

Let me know if it helped.

Honestly, it’s pretty easy to do. But when searching for documentation, it wasn’t easy to find exactly what I wanted to do, so I figured I should blog about it.

What I needed was a way to easily connect my existing web application with facebook connect. What’s Facebook Connect? In a nutshell, it allows users to log in and register to your site via their facebook credentials. Here’s some more in – depth detail if you’re looking for more information; this tutorial assumes you know what the deal is with Facebook Connect and want to get it onto your application soon.

I added facebook connect to a site running PHP and using MySQL for the database; this tutorial assumes you will be doing so as well. I used Facebook’s PHP API to connect my site, and the same goes with that. If you’ve ever build a facebook application before, you’re familiar with Facebook’s API.

The last assumption I make is that you have already built a site with a full user login system, your site allows cookies, and caters to javascript enabled browsers. Basically, you built this site of yours after 2002 or so.

After the break we’ll get to it.

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If you’re an iPhone snob like me, you find yourself talking to anyone you can about the latest apps from the store, that new case you saw on the iPhone Blog, the funny / jealous looks people give you on the street thumbing your iPod app around, etc etc.

After glorifying in it’s awesomeness enough, someone will eventually say to me “yeah, but it has shit for battery life.”

And here’s the shocker: I disagree. I’m fairly satisfied with my iPhone’s battery life. And for that matter, I’ve always been satisfied with my cell phone batteries for as long as I’ve had cell phones in my life. Same with laptop batteries. What do these rechargeable batteries (usually) have in common? They’re Lithium Ion batteries.

Bottom line: Lithium Ion batteries DO NOT have to degrade in battery life. All you have to do is take better care of them. And all THAT requires is 3 easy changes in your life, and the habits you develop in charging your batteries.

Check past the jump for these 3 steps and a quick explanation.

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