Rethinking blogs at the New York Times

The New York Times website was redesigned recently. You can read about the technology behind it. Personally, I’ve been waiting for a behind-the-scenes about the WordPress at the core of their blogging operations. Scott Taylor delivers with an article entitled Rethinking Blogs at the New York Times.

Because we are turning WP content into Module content, we no longer want our themes to produce complete HTML documents: we only to produce the “content” of the page. Our Madison page layout gives us a wrapper and loads our app-specific scripts and styles. We have enough opportunities to override default template stubs to inject Blog-specific content where necessary.

Overall, it’s less about a visual redesign and more about an architectural redesign. The NYT’s legacy system seems like it was an absolute nightmare. I tried to condense Scott’s article into a short blurb, but I can’t. So, if you’re remotely interested in the structure of large scale online publishing systems go read it (regardless of your opinion about WordPress). If you are a WordPress developer, there’s some cool stuff going on, like abstracting the away the visual structure.

The period of anger

The period is pissed. It seems that using the period at the end of text messages is starting to be seen as passive aggressive.

The period was always the humblest of punctuation marks. Recently, however, it’s started getting angry. I’ve noticed it in my text messages and online chats, where people use the period not simply to conclude a sentence, but to announce “I am not happy about the sentence I just concluded.”

Overthinking things

I was chatting with Zach the other night and mentioned that I have a tendency to overthink things and never follow through on projects and whatnot. His reply was spot on, “You… overthink? Never”. It bothered me a bit, but the truth can hurt.

When I was younger, I had a tendency to put everything I did online… just didn’t think about it and posted whatever. As I aged, I started to worry more about my posting (relevancy, career suicide, whatever). I got older. And older. And I’ve reached the point where I’ve stopped giving a fuck.

This is my personal site, you don’t have to be here. If I feel like posting a ton of articles on some particular day and lose subscribers or hits or whatever, that’s fine. Don’t worry, this isn’t a crazy rant, just a pre-cursor to more regular content posting. Cheers!

The story of an old-timey programming hack

I thoroughly enjoyed reading Tom Moertel’s tale of a great old-timey game-programming hack, it reminded me of my computer science days and assembly programming.

A long time ago, when I was a college undergrad, I spent some time working on computer video games. This was in the 8-bit PC era, so the gaming hardware was almost impossibly slow by today’s standards.

It might not surprise you, then, to learn that, back then, game programmers did all sorts of crazy things to make their games run at playable speeds. Crazy, crazy things.

This is a story about one of those things.

Crockpot Guinness Pulled Pork

Pulled Pork

5lb Pork Shoulder
1 can Guinness
1 white onion, thinly sliced
3 cloves garlic

Brining

1/2 cup salt
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 tsp cumin
1 tsp paprika
1 clove garlic
2 bay leaves
1 tsb black pepper

Brined overnight. Placed the onions on the bottom of the crockpot as a base. Put the pork shoulder on the onions. Run a can of Guinness over it. Drop the garlic on top. Set the crockpot on low. Try to go for at least 8 hours, you can play around with temperature and time.

Served on a toasted bun with coleslaw. I prefer something vinegary, but it’s up to you.

Antitext

TELEPHONE ONLY TELEPHONE ONLY by Eric Boucheron

Eric Boucheron is an old internet friend of mine. We made things together at the turn of the century (too early?), as members of an art collective called Suffocate. He has started posting artwork on his website again. It’s awesome, you should go check it out.

I’ve always loved his work, it was a big influence on my early grunge aesthetic. He also takes pictures of banana peels.

Educate don’t humiliate

From Dan Edwards in response to overly harsh design critics dickheads, Educate don’t humiliate:

As a general rule we should try better to understand why the designer has made the decisions they’ve made and think about their experience and how we can help, not just humiliate them. Take the time to provide newbies with the resources and answers that they need. That’s education.

Especially pointed given how easy it is to offer a knee-jerk reaction on the internet. Of course, I’ve never done anything like that.

The same notes could be applied to developers too. It’s easy to become dismissive of someone’s work because they did it in an unfashionable language, or a different coding style, or used some sort of kludgy hack. There was likely a reason behind the decision, which may be worth examining before picking up the pitchfork.

Updated: Upon further reflection, they should not be called design critics (we’ll go with Dan’s original intent). Also, forgot to link to actual article.

Aiming for whiskey perfection

An article by Wayne Curtis for The Atlantic takes a look at The New Science of Old Whiskey.

In April 2006, a tornado struck Warehouse C at the Buffalo Trace Distillery in Frankfort, Kentucky. In the aftermath, the building looked like a diorama: part of the roof and one wall had been artfully removed to reveal the 25,000 barrels stacked inside. Miraculously, not a single one of those barrels was damaged.

Repairing the warehouse took several months, and during that time the barrels on the upper floors were exposed to rain, heat, and sun. Mark Brown, Buffalo Trace’s president and CEO, joked at the time that the distillery should sell the whiskey as “tornado-surviving bourbon.”

It turned out to be no joke. The barrels were opened about five years later (the liquor inside had then aged for nine to 11 years) and, says Brown, “the darnedest thing is, when we went to taste the whiskey, it was really good. I mean really good.”

Go read about the new era of whiskey: science, data, testing and tasting.