Long-time readers of this blog will be aware that I have been a vocal supporter and proponent of the Thesis framework for WordPress for quite some time. This site runs on Thesis, and I am always keen to recommend it to others (for crying out loud, there’s a giant ad for Thesis in my sidebar). That being said, I’ve recently been considering dropping Thesis from this blog and replacing it with my own custom theme.

Why am I thinking about this? Over the past few months, I’ve been working on a side project developing a custom CMS and blog using WordPress for the Chicago Photography Center. When I started the project, I considered using Thesis for the theme/framework…and decided that with the very high level of customization that was going to be required, it was going to be a better solution to develop a custom theme (that, and I wanted to flex my PHP chops).

In the process, I learned a LOT about theme development. And when I had to do some coding updates the other day for It Builds Character, I was actually a little annoyed to have to do them in Thesis, when I had just spent the previous few months wallowing in my own code. This made me start to reconsider my choice of Thesis for this blog (and possible IBC). Here are some of my reasons why.

Thesis compatibility with plugins

Another WordPress add-on that I love is W3TotalCache. This is a plugin which is useful for dramatically increasing the performance of your WordPress site through a mixture of page/object caching, CDN configuration, and minification. However, I’ve often run into issues getting this plugin to work – especially when I try to mix the Thesis dynamic CSS file with the minification and CDN delivery in W3TC.

I’m not alone – if you Google  “thesis w3 total cache” you will find a multitude of people having issues with the combination of W3TC and Thesis. Of course, one could make the argument that this is more of a W3TC issue than a Thesis one, and you’re probably right. That being said, I have a greater chance of the developer of W3TC testing his code against a stock WordPress install than Thesis (and comments I’ve seen have led me to believe that the developer has no interest in testing against Thesis).

This is true of other plugins as well – when I look to install or update a plugin, WordPress happily reports as to whether or not the developer has tested the plugin with the version of WordPress I am running. There is no such report for Thesis compatibility.

Of course, it’s entirely possible that a plugin would be incompatible with my own custom theme. The upshot is when it’s my code, I can fix it myself. And I don’t run the risk of installing an “upgrade” to my theme that might break plugins or behavior.

Flexibility

This might sound a little wacky, since one of the main benefits of Thesis is its flexibility. And it’s VERY flexible. But it’s not nearly as flexible as writing my own code. For instance, on the IBC site we have enabled the Show interior layout borders option. But when I had to removed it on one portion of the layout, it took a little digging (okay, a VERY little digging, thanks to Chrome Developer Tools) to figure out exactly where Thesis had declared that setting. Which was pretty easy to just override in the custom.css. However, once I did that, I decided I didn’t like the way the sidebar didn’t extend all the way to the footer like the content did. If it was my theme, I could have switched around the layout in the manner I wanted (I’m sure there are all sorts of ways to do this in Thesis, so don’t bother telling me how to do it in the comments – that’s not my point).

Thesis is super powerful and flexible – if you learn Thesis. I know there ‘s nothing I can do in my custom theme that a Thesis guru cannot do with some clever hooks or custom.css wizardry. That being said, I’ve come to the conclusion that I’d rather invest my time and effort in becoming a PHP/WordPress expert, and not a Thesis expert.

Workflow has become a pain

One of the things I like about my implementation of Thesis is the use of a “post image” and a “post thumbnail”, which are used outside of the actual post content to create a header image and then a thumbnail for teasers. However the manner of getting them going is a royal PITA in my Thesis implementation. First I have to upload BOTH files (the full post image and the thumbnail) into the Media Library of WordPress (I can’t have Thesis auto-generate my thumbnails because I want to serve them via the CDN). Then I have to copy the URL of the images and paste them into the option boxes in the post.

Is this the end of the world? No. But wouldn’t it be better to just use the built-in “Featured Image” functionality of WordPress? Again, this is totally possible to hook together with Thesis (I am sure) – but why spend all that time coding to hack Thesis, when I could be hacking together my OWN code?

Supportability

One of the reasons I’m considering investing some time in re-coding It Builds Character into a custom theme is that I am NOT the only person who does work on that site. Occasionally, ChiMomWriter needs something coded or tweaked, and I don’t have time to do it for her – so she hires outside help. Outside help that not only needs to know WordPress (and be capable of understanding my strange configurations of it) but also understands Thesis. It’s basically a secondary level of software knowledge required. Granted, there are eleventy-billion self-granted Thesis gurus out there, but there are even more (possibly within your circle of trust) who know WordPress alone.

Should YOU drop Thesis?

Absolutely not. By no means am I trying to say that Thesis is a bad product or that nobody should use it. Quite the contrary – if you aren’t interested in doing anything more than very light coding, Thesis is a GREAT way to add a ton of power and flexibility to your WordPress site. I will continue to recommend it to just about anyone (and if you DO decide to go with Thesis, please feel free to use my affiliate link). But as I’ve learned more about theme development, I feel like I’ve “outgrown” Thesis, and I’d rather expend my skull sweat on writing my own code instead of getting to be a SME on Thesis.

What about you? If you are currently using the Thesis framework, what do you like about it? Have you considered switching to your own custom theme? Let me know in the comments!

Every year on my birthday, I receive an email from myself, written the year before, via the FutureMe.org service (hattip to my friend Trapper for giving me the idea several year ago).

I just received the letter from 2010. It’s interesting to review it, and see how things have changed in a year:

Dear FutureMe,

Happy 37th birthday! Wow, you sure are getting old. I hope that 2011 was a great year for you. The boys are almost TWO YEARS OLD for you now…that blows my mind.

As a reminder, here are some of the things that happened to you almost exactly a year ago today (I’m writing this from Dec 8):

1) You are in the middle of High Performance Management training from CV. Since it’s now a year later, have you been able to actually do anything with what you learned?

2) Your wife is freaking out about the holidays and getting things ready for the boys’ first birthday party. I hope it worked out well and everyone had a great time.

3) You are going through RCIA at Old St. Pat’s. Do you remember what that was like?

4) You’re getting ready to have a sit-down with your boss about career direction. Has anything changed in the year between?

5) We are ALMOST about of beta for Redesign 5…and by the time you are reading this, 5.1 should be live as well. What does Apartments.com look like in Dec 2011?

6) Becky and Eric will be married by now. How was their wedding?

Happy birthday, old man!

Past Matt

Looking at this letter, it reminds me of the fact that on my birthday last year, we had no idea that Sophia would be a part of our family and our lives. 2011 was a truly challenging year for me, but it was also a year filled with amazing changes.

This letter also helps me really think about what happened in the past year. As implied, I completed the RCIA journey at Old St. Pat’s – a process that was a very important part of my life for the first half of 2011! My sister-in-law, Becky, had a wonderful wedding this summer. And the boys had a great first birthday party.

It’s amusing to look at some of the work-related items…item 5 is really probably only of interest to my co-workers, but for those of you who do not work with me, the reason it is somewhat funny is that in 2011, we went through a massive change in our methodology (for the better), but it means that certain terms don’t make sense in our world any more. Agile, baby.

Happy birthday to me!

There’s a vlog meme running around, where people upload videos of themselves saying certain words or phrases, and then you, the viewer, identify the accent.

So here’s mine.

Say the following words:
Aunt, route, wash, oil, theatre, iron, salmon, caramel, fire, water, sure, data, ruin, crayon, toilet, New Orleans, pecan, both, again, probably, spitting image, Alabama, lawyer, coupon, mayonnaise, syrup, pajamas, caught

Answer these questions:
What is it called when you throw toilet paper on a house?
What is the bug that curls into a ball when you touch it?
What is the bubbly carbonated drink called?
What do you call gym shoes?
What do you say to address a group of people?
What do you call the kind of spider that has an oval-shaped body and extremely long legs?
What do you call your grandparents?
What do you call the wheeled contraption in which you carry groceries at the supermarket?
What do you call it when rain falls while the sun is shining?
What is the thing you use to change the TV channel?

So, what do you think?  Do I have an accent?

Inspired by this post.

I’m pretty much in love with the service known as ifttt – “if this, then that”. It’s kind of like a scripting language for the Internet.

For example, if all goes according to plan, just by virtue of creating a new post in WordPress, the link will be auto-shared to my Facebook fan page.

I’ve also started experimenting with having YouTube video uploads automatically create WordPress posts (for use on MSTHK). Lots of potential here. After I’ve gotten a bit smarter with it, I’ll definitely be posting more about this super cool service.

A while ago, I wrote up a small post posting the results of the “blog speedup” I did for my friend Jenn. What I didn’t do was actually explain HOW I did it. This post will dive into the settings and steps needed to make your WordPress blog super-duper fast. NOTE: This will only work on a “self-hosted” WordPress installation. You will not be able to do this if your blog is hosted at WordPress.com.

Install W3 Total Cache

The main tool we will be using is the awesome plugin, W3 Total Cache. This is a plugin that has a LOT of options. Instructions on how to install WordPress plugins are a little out of scope for this article, but if you aren’t sure how to do this, then I’m also a little worried that we’ll be over your head with this. But just in case, here is a hint:

After you have installed it, it must be activated. This is pretty easy. But again, here’s a screenshot.

Congratulations. You’ve installed the plugin. This is the easiest part. Now, buckle up, because it’s gonna get awesome.

Configure W3 Total Cache

All of the configuration settings can be found under the new “Performance” menu on the left side.

If you expand it out, you’ll see various sections. We’re going to step through each of them one at a time.

General Settings

If you’re a fan of How I Met Your Mother, you probably just saluted when you read this section. Regardless, we will look quickly at the settings you should change in here.

Under “General”, you can leave that one alone for now. We’ll come back here once we have everything set up to actually activate our changes, but you probably don’t want to do that until you’ve completely configured everything.

You also want to leave Minify disabled for now. There is an art to minification, and I’ll dive into it much deeper in another post, but for now, let’s leave it off.

Go ahead and make sure that “Enabled” is checked for Page Cache, Database Cache, and Object Cache. Set it to Disk or Disk Enhanced (if you have other options that show up, awesome, but you probably don’t. Disk Enhanced is generally good enough for most blogs). Then click “Save All Settings”.

Content Delivery Network

Now comes the real fun part – configuring our Content Delivery Network. Basically, with a CDN, we serve up things like scripts, stylesheets, and images to the browser via a distributed network. Why do we do this? Two things: First, it takes load off of OUR server (see this post for more details). But secondly, it can vastly improve the performance of the page, because the browser is now getting those big files from servers that are very close to them, instead of having to go all the way through the internet to get to YOUR server. In this post, I will be demonstrating how to do this with Amazon S3 and CloudFront. There are other CDN’s, but I personally use Amazon. Be advised – this is NOT a free service, and the cost model is totally based upon how much traffic you send thorugh it. That being said, I haven’t found it to be terribly expensive. It is suggested that you watch your usage carefully when you first turn this on – and if it starts to look spendy, you can always turn it off.

Configure the CDN

First, make sure your CDN settings under General Settings look like this, and then click “Save All Settings”.

This will generate an error like this:

Don’t worry! We’re going to fix this. Here’s how. Click on “CDN” in the Performance menu:

Now scroll down to the section titled “Configuration”. You will enter your Amazon Web Services Access Key ID and Secret Key in here:

“Wait a tick,” you are saying. What the hell is an ‘Amazon Web Services Access Key ID and Secret Key’?”

Setting up Amazon

Good question. To get going with this, you will need an AWS account. You will sign up for this at http://aws.amazon.com/. Unfortunately, I already have my account, and I’m not going to create a new one, so you’ll have to go without screenshots. But once you have your account, sign onto the management console and click on Security Credentials:

Scroll down to the Access Credentials section. Here’s where you will find the Access Key ID and Secret Key we just talked about. Don’t worry if you only see one Access Key on your screen. I’m honestly not sure why I have two.

Now that you have entered your Access Key ID and Secret Key into the box, it should look like this (obviously mine are blurred out). Enter in a name for the S3 “bucket” you want to create (I usually do something with the sitename-origin, but you can call it whatever you want) and then click “Create Bucket and Distribution”.

After it has completed successfully, you will see this screen. Click “Close”

Later on, you can change the hostname used for your CDN to something from your own domain by creating a CNAME record. But for starters, leave this as it is, and then click “Test”:

If everything worked, you will see a small green notification that “Test Passed”. Now you can click “Save All Settings”.

Getting the CDN loaded

There are a few housekeeping things we must do in order to get all of our “old” files up to the CDN. One at a time, click the following buttons. Don’t click another button until the previous one has completed.

Each button will pop up a new window. Make sure you click “Start”, and then wait for it to complete before closing the window and clicking the next button. Depending upon the number of images in previous posts, this step could take a long time to complete.

Pushing the Go Button

Now that you’ve got your configuration completed, it’s time to turn it on! Click on the “General Settings” link on the Performance menu, and click “Deploy” under Preview Mode:

Once completed, you’ll get this confirmation:

Success! You have now enabled basic server-side caching, as well as some super awesome Content Delivery Network functionality on your blog.

One Caveat

Of course, all this caching comes with a bit of a cost. Any time you make a DESIGN type change to your blog (changing your header, or maybe some styling, etc) you will need to “clear the cache”. You do this by going to back to the General Settings section of Performance, and clicking “Empty All Caches”

I realize that this post is SUPER long and pretty complex. But hopefully it will help you get started on speeding up your WordPress installation. In Part 2, we will dig into some of the other possible settings, including Browser Caching as well as configuring a CNAME for your CDN so it is served from your own domain. Part 3 will discuss the Minify options. Good luck and speedy serving!

Welcome to the next installment in our “New Facebook 101″ segment. Previously, I showed you how to set up your “Close Friends” and “Acquaintances” lists for maximum power. In this post we will dig a little deeper into how you can move your previously set up lists into these lists.

Why merge lists?

In my case, I had set up a bunch of lists which were initially used as security boundries, but ended up being very similar in use. For example, I had a “HS” list (which stands for “High School”) and a “Twitter” list. Both of these lists had very different people in them, but were used similarly (mostly to block the ability to see my phone number).

In “New Facebook”, the functionality of these lists is easily reproduced by the “Acquaintances” list. So I want to merge them into this list to make my life easier.

How to merge lists

When you merge a list into another list, the original list is removed. It’s quite easy to do, although not the easiest feature to find. So here are some screenshots and steps.

First, choose the list you want to merge INTO. In my case, this will be Acquaintances.

Then, click on the “Manage List” drop-down and choose “Merge List…”

Now you get to choose which list you want to merge FROM. This is the list that will be deleted.

After you choose the list, click on “Merge Lists” to confirm.

Once this is completed, all of the folks in the previous list will now be in the new list.

IMPORTANT NOTE – a Friend cannot be a member of both “Close Friends” and “Acquaintances”. So if you merge a “Close Friends” person into “Acquaintances”, they will lose their “Close Friends” membership and you will need to manually flip them back.

If you are a user of Facebook, you are no doubt aware that there have been some major changes lately…especially around the Feed. I’m not going to tell you why the new way is better, because either a) you already know, so why bother, or b) you already decided it’s not, so again, why bother.

Instead, the purpose of this post is to explain exactly how to tweak the hell out of your Facebook Lists in a way that makes the “new” Facebook work FOR you, instead of AGAINST you.

Reading Lists vs. Posting Lists

I have written previously about using Facebook Friend Lists to create “security boundaries” to keep your professional and personal life separate on Facebook. This was an example of a “Posting List” – a list of Friends used to restrict who might see something you POST. In “New Facebook”, we also look at the idea of “Reading Lists” – groups of Friends used to control and segment what you read and when. While it’s possible to have the same Lists used as both Reading and Posting lists, I don’t recommend it, simply because it gets too easy to make a security mistake.

Your Reading Lists

The two primary Lists you will need to set up are Close Friends and Acquaintances. Facebook already creates these Lists for you, and even is happy to provide you with suggestions on who should go into them. Feel free to use Facebook’s suggestions, but first make sure you understand how each List will be used.

My approach towards the Reading Lists in Facebook is very similar to my method for organizing feeds in Google Reader. Except, instead of “Can’t Miss” and “Skip ‘Em”, we will be using “Close Friends” and “Acquaintances”.

“Close Friends”

Step one – completely ignore the name of this list. We are not necessarily going to restrict this list to people you consider your “close” friends. In fact, it’s possible that you might have hundreds of people in this List…and it’s not likely that you have 100+ “close friends” for real. Or maybe you do. Either way, it doesn’t matter for our purposes here.

The “Close Friends” list serves the same purpose as the “Can’t Miss” folder in my Google Reader strategy. This is the list of people who you want to make sure you don’t miss ANYTHING about. When determining who should go into this list, ask yourself this question:

If this person posted about a major life event (getting engaged or married, or having children) would I be upset if I missed it?

If the answer is “Yes”, then they belong on this list. We’ll be talking about how this list is used in a little bit. But for now, go ahead and populate this list with all the folks who you would be all pissy if you missed out on reading about them adopting a new puppy (because, aww! Puppy!)

Here’s how:

First, click on the "Close Friends" list on the left side of your Facebook screen

Next, under "Manage List", click "Add/Remove Friends"

Finally, click once on each person you want to add. The little checkbox means they will be added. Click "Done" when, well, you're done.

Acquaintances

These are the folks who, if you missed some of their lifestream, wouldn’t shake you up too badly. Depending on how you use Facebook, you might not have anyone in this list – it’s entirely possible that you put EVERYONE in “Close Friends”. This is okay. It’s weird, but it’s okay.

That being said, go ahead and add everyone who is not in “Close Friends” into this list. Unfortunately, there is not an easy way to do this. Do your best. This works exactly the same as Close Friends, except you choose a different list. It might not show up by default on the left, so you might have to click “MORE” to the right of “LISTS”.

Using your new Reading Lists

Now, in theory, everyone on your Friends list should belong to either “Close Friends” or “Acquaintances”. It’s okay if someone falls through the cracks, but bear in mind, these are the folks that you aren’t going to have any real way of tracking. They’ll just pop up, somewhere, sometimes, in your Feed. But that shouldn’t be a problem, since they clearly weren’t memorable enough for you to know if they are a Close Friend or not.

There’s a lot of tweaking you can do with each list for how it affects your main feed – you can set what types of updates to receive from each list. You remember the dropdown you clicked for “Add/Remove Friends”? It has an option called “Choose Update Types”:

Your friends would probably like it if you uncheck "Comments and Likes". if nothing else, it might stop them from posting that one status message asking you to do this for each of them individually. Or maybe not.

Once you have your tweaks set up for both Lists, it’s time to put them to use. Generally speaking, you should be able to fire along just fine using the main Feed. Consider this the “all items” view in Google Reader. But if you are in a bit of a hurry, or you want to make sure you are all caught up with the people who matter to you…just click on the “Close Friends” link on the left nav:

Ta da! You now see all the updates from your Close Friends…in chronological order…without any crazy “Top Stories” or whatever it was that annoyed you about the Feed.

So why do we have the Acquaintances list? Because, you know, maybe you get bored and you want to see what the other folks are up to. You can click on this List the exact same way and have the same result.

If you are feeling really saucy, you can always create additional Reading Lists based upon topics. For example, if you have a bunch of friends who only post pictures of cats, and you want to be able to see a feed full of cat pictures, you can create a list called “Crazy Cat People”…put your cat folks into it, and set the update type to only Photos. This won’t assure you that non-cat photos will be excluded, but if you build the list properly, you just might be able to pull it off.

What about Pages?

To be honest, I really have no idea how Page factor into the Feed algorithm. You cannot weight a page by adding it to a List, and you also can’t specify the type of updates you get from a Page…you can either have it show up or not. I am sure there will be more changes around the sorting of updates from Pages in the weeks to come, but at this point, you’re just kind of stuck with them showing up in the Feed wherever they darn well feel like. If you have noticed any changes or input into how Pages are working in the new Feed, please post them in the comments. I’ll update with any new scoop I receive.

Please let me know how this works for you! I’m hoping that this gives a little more power to controlling the Feed, or at least working around it when necessary. There is still a bit of wonkiness around how the Feed gets populated (for example, why would my Feed ever consider one of my own posts to be a Top Story for me? I don’t need to read my own stuff as high priority!), but it has been helping me with some of the noise control…especially with a properly populated Close Friends list. Even if you don’t “trust” Facebook to “tell me what is important”, remember – you can always bail to the List view to simply see posts in a chronological order, the way you want to. For now.

Sophia Margaret Stratton was born at 8:15 PM on September 16, 2011.

We might be biased, but we think she’s pretty cute.

She also made her YouTube debut:

We are at the hospital waiting for the arrival of Baby Girl Stratton!

Follow me on Twitter (@mattstratton) for updates!

Today, for , the topic is “a fictional book.” One of my favorite books is Skinny Legs And All by Tom Robbins.