Lately, I’ve been having harebrained ideas about new stuff late at night, and have condensed that all into a new child theme that I’m working on. It’s based off the Thematic framework made by Ian Stewart.

It’s very much a work in progress, and I will be updating it as much as I can, so bear with me.

The Panic State of the Union ’11, with a link to the Coda 2 private beta signup page. Thanks for your interest! http://t.co/KUE2jyIN  —C

October 26, 2011 1:17 pm via CoTweetReplyRetweetFavorite

@panic

Panic Inc

This is possibly one of the coolest ways to gather data I’ve ever seen. The automated phone call was so cool! Hats off, Panic!

Thank you Steve.

Starting last night at about 11pm, my phone started blowing up with push notifications from my Twitter client. Hundreds and hundreds more Twitter @-mentions followed, and I had to turn off notifications. Some of these tweets came from real-ish looking people, and some came from what are clearly bots. At first I just thought this was a random occurence. Such is the danger of having a real english word as a Twitter handle (I get all sorts of mis-tweets). I poked at the links these tweets contained, and at first glance didn’t think any of them pointed to anything real.

#Twitter #news: Twitter Wants The @Trademark For The Term ‘Tweet’ http://t.co/74iWTm9K

September 30, 2011 12:37 pm via twitterfeedReplyRetweetFavorite

@SocialNetworkUs

Dan

However, on further examination, many of the tweets mentioned Perez Hilton. I did a quick google search and found an article on his site with my Twitter handle in the title. That’s where all this madness is coming from. Have we really reached the point where we will put an @ @in @front @of @everything? Also, I wish there was some way I could ban this stuff from my feed. EDIT: A coworker reminded me of this great post by a former coworker with a similar situation. You should follow her (@skinny) on Twitter.

Even the example task, importing all your Instagram photos to Dropbox is incredibly useful! Cool to see a bunch of WordPress actions right at the top. Do you use ifttt? Let me know uf you come up with any cool workflows!

All of our sites like I Can Has Cheezburger?, FAILBlog and Memebase run on the amazing WordPress.com VIP service. I personally love it due to the fact that I don’t ever have to worry about servers, something I used to do way too frequently. Anyhow, being on WordPress.com does pose some interesting coding challenges. Many of the things you may come across with your own WordPress install can be solved by installing a plugin. On WordPress.com you need to roll your own solution, and check with them to make sure you’re not hosing all the millions of other blogs they host.

As stated above, I’ve been working on an A/B testing solution so we can try out new features, redesigns and services on the fly. We’ve done this in the past, but have always done it on the client side, and we wanted a more robust solution— one that didn’t involve inserting so much junk code into our theme. However, switching to server-side logic meant we needed to make WordPress.com’s caching solution, batcache, aware of what we’re doing. It took me quite a bit to wrap my head around it, but in the end the implementation is fairly simple. I won’t post the specific code here, but there’s a function where you can essentially tell batcache to serve a certain version of a page based on some simple logic (cookie, user agent, something that can be tested before the theme loads).

Armed with this knowledge, I set forth trying to get batcache running on my dev box, so I could ensure my code was performing correctly. First, I tried installing memcached, which turned out to be a nightmare. OS X comes with a default version of PHP installed, which led to me trying to compilie something for the wrong version of PHP. I eventually found that the code was being compiled for the wrong processor architecture, but I had hosed stuff too much to try to work around it. Fortunately for me, I was at WordCamp San Francisco while trying to do this, and attended Mark Jaquith’s awesome presentation, where he mentioned a plugin he had written for WordPress called APC Object Cache Backend. Here’s how I used MAMP and APC to get batcache running locally:

• First: Open up MAMP preferences and click to the PHP tab. You’ll see a cache dropdown, which you should set to APC.

  

• Second: Go download Mark Jaquith’s APC plugin and follow the installation instructions.

• Third: Go download the Batcache plugin and follow the installation instructions (not the bit about memcached)

• Last: Open up an incognito window in Chrome (you’re using Chrome, right?) and refresh your site a few times. You should now see the batcache header:

  <!--
  	generated in 7.391 seconds
  	21506 bytes batcached for 300 seconds
  -->

Now you’re caching with batcache! I know it seems a little silly to run a cache locally, but I like knowing that the code I’m testing works with the actual end product.

If you want to read more about batcache, check out the author Andy Skelton’s blog!

Andy Skelton – Batcache for WordPress

I’ll try to blog more about what I’m working on in the future, and possibly some more on this A/B testing stuff!

I made these over the weekend and figured I’d drop the recipe for my records and for anyone wanting to attempt it themselves. I will say that I usually don’t use measured quantities of things, especially when I’m testing stuff out. I use an enameled cast-iron dutch oven (with a lid) for this recipe, but you could also use a roasting pan.

Pork Carnitas w/Pico de Gallo

Ingredients:

Pork:

• Boneless / Bone-In Pork Shoulder, 3-4 pounds (depending on how much you want to make)
• Cumin
• Chili Powder
• Salt
• Pepper
• Paprika
• Olive Oil

Pico:

• 2 medium Tomatoes
• 1 Red Onion
• 1 Jalapeño
• 2 Limes
• Cilantro (half bunch)
• Salt
• Pepper
• OPTIONAL: 2 Garlic scapes

Directions:

Preheat your oven to 300-325 ℉. Heat 1-2 tbs oil in a dutch oven (large enough to fit your pork) over medium high heat. Brown the pork shoulder on all sides. While the pork is browning, mix together the dry ingredients to make a rub. You can adjust the portions to adjust the flavor. I tend to like a lot of cumin, and usually add something like cayenne for heat as well. Once the pork is browned, turn off the heat and remove the pork to a dish (I use a pie plate). Cover the pork in rub, get it in all the crevices. Place the pork back in the dutch oven, put on the lid and pop it in the oven. Cook for around 3 hours. I usually check on it half way.

While the pork is cooking, you can make your pico. Dice the tomato and onion and place in a bowl. Chop / mince the jalapeño and cilantro and add those. At this point, I used a mandoline on a couple of garlic scapes to add some more flavor. Finally, add salt and pepper, squeeze in limes, stir and refrigerate.

After around 3 hours, your pork should be done. Take it out of the oven and remove the pork shoulder to a plate to use for shredding, but keep the oven on. You can get rid of the drippings if you like, but I usually save them and skim them, so you should too. Roughly shred the pork using two forks. You want to keep it kinda chunky, not super stringy. In a 12″ skillet (I used cast iron), heat a few tbs. of olive oil over medium high heat. Add pork in medium-ish batches and brown it, until it gets crispy outsides / edges. I only used about half my pork (saving some for BBQ!), so only did one pan. While I was browning the pork, I reduced the drippings down to about half a cup. I proceeded to pour this into the browned pork, stirred it around a bit, then put the whole pan (cast-iron, baby!) into the oven to bake off the liquid. This took about 15 mins or so (don’t really remember).

Turn the oven off to keep the pork warm but not cooking. Heat some tortillas, shred some cheese, take your pico out and you’re good to go!

I love slow cooking pork shoulder like this because you can do so much with it. You can eat it just like roast pork, turn it into carnitas or add some BBQ sauce to make pulled pork sandwiches. Good stuff!