Torque

Since
August 08, 2013

Michael Bastos

The Day WordPress Took Back the Internet, Again

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Featured, News

Published

February 10, 2014

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With each new leak getting consecutively worse, stories of NSA surveillance have caused quite an uproar recently online. We’ve gone from gawking at amateurish PowerPoint presentations explaining the level at which PRISM operates, to hearing about government sponsored Malware convincing the head of Microsoft to refer to the NSA as a serious and persistent threat to internet security. And headlines continue to reach new levels of absurdity with events like the NSA phone-tapping the German Chancellor and creating tools for hacking Cisco, Juniper and Wahwei routers with ease. It’s time, once again, to take action. Tomorrow, on Feb 11, people from all corners of the web (and […]

CES 2014: From a WordPress Perspective

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Community, Events

Published

February 6, 2014

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I recently spent 4 days in Las Vegas for CES 2014 and noticed a few technologies that—in my opinion—we in the WordPress community will want to actively monitor, as they could potentially affect the future of the platform. Reverse Responsive Design 2012 saw the push for responsive design in themes in order to accommodate smart phones that required developers to handle both touch events as well as different screen sizes and resolutions. By the close of 2013, it was practically impossible to find a theme that was not responsive (I say this jokingly), and mobile design was openly embraced by the WordPress […]

Here Are My 2014 WordPress Predictions…What Are Yours?

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Community, Featured

Published

December 31, 2013

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Everybody loves to make predictions, especially this time of year. It’s human nature for us to analyze our environment and want to make educated guesses as to what is just over the horizon. We all do it. Yet few people actually follow through with checking on their predictions a year later. So let’s change that this year! As a big fan of the Tech News Today podcast and their prediction and prediction results episodes, I asked all of you for your predictions on the Advanced WordPress Facebook page. I also wanted to make a few of my own for WordPress in 2014 […]

The Past, Present and Future of DesktopServer

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Community, Featured

Published

December 17, 2013

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Stephen Carnham has been a good friend for many years now. I first met him when a few of us down here in San Diego were wanting to start Advanced WordPress. Having come from a long and extensive career in Software Engineering, he helped bring a new level of code understanding and complexity to an already advanced bunch of guys. Stephen first started DesktopServer out of his home after many years in the WordPress world. His company ServerPress is not only expanding to three-plus, but is seriously disrupting local WordPress development across the board, and simplifying the lives of many in the process. […]

Live Collaborative Development with Codio

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Community

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December 4, 2013

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What Is It? It’s called Codio and it’s basically an online IDE-like tool that lets you host your code and develop via a web interface that’s pretty fast and responsive. The idea is that Codio becomes your local development environment, and even allows you to deploy code to your stage servers. And the best part is…they work with WordPress. I have my friend Chris Lema to thank for recently sharing this awesome tool with me. I’ve been falling in love with the concept of social coding (beyond with what I’m already doing on GitHub) and this tool fits the bill. There are a few things to […]

Who is Nathan Walker of WP Avengers?

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Community

Published

November 27, 2013

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Recently I received an email from a Nathan Walker of WP Avengers infamy—claiming that he now has 39 WooCommerce extensions available in his store for the holidays, and that the number will continue to grow. I’m on their mailing list because I like to know what’s going on in the WordPress community. Although I’m a developer by profession—and not an investigative journalist—I decided to pretend to be one for the day. I set out to try and find out who this guy really is, why he’s choosing to stay anonymous, and why he’s giving us this bogus name, Nathan Walker. […]

Managing a Larger WordPress Community

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Community

Published

November 14, 2013

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When I first got into WordPress in 2009, I never thought that years later I’d be helping to manage an active 2,200+ online Advanced WordPress (AWP) Community, or a 30+ Local AWP Monthly San Diego Meetup. Over the years, community building within the WordPress space has been a hard road full of personalities and individual interests. But it’s something that I enjoy doing and have a lot of passion for. When I was recently approached by Torque to become a regular “Community” contributor, I realized that I do have a lot to say about this amazing community, and a lot that I […]

Why Schema.org is Crucial to WordPress

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Community

Published

October 30, 2013

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Recently, there have been a number of articles discussing the new Hummingbird upgrade on Google Search. Many of you have probably already heard that because of this change, it will be more important to use Schema.org in your site’s syntax in the future. But what is Schema.org, and how does it apply to how I’m building my web pages? Schema.org was a joint effort by Google, and a number of other search engines, started a few years ago to try to get more semantic information from web pages. In essence, it teaches content owners to think like programmers by creating inherited […]

Ghost is Among Us, Now What?

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News

Published

October 14, 2013

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A few months ago, John O’Nolan surprised the WordPress world with his idea of creating a whole new blogging platform called Ghost. The theory in his mind was that the WordPress ecosystem had spent too much time focusing on turning WordPress into a CMS, and had lost touch with its origins in blogging. Though his ideas were echoed positively by many in the community, a few saw the idea behind Ghost as a potential rival to WordPress. Most of the higher end enterprise clients who use WordPress still maintain it as part of their blogging ecosystems. I will try my best […]

Confessions of a Reluctant GoDaddy Customer

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Community

Published

September 18, 2013

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Yesterday, I did the unthinkable. I signed up for a year of GoDaddy hosting on their least expensive (shared) plan. The account is for testing and would hardly qualify as noteworthy, except when viewed through the lens of my background. Let me explain. A couple years ago I left the fixed hardware world, better known as shared, VPS, and dedicated servers, and set sail for the lush beaches of cloud services. During that time, and continuing today, I worked almost exclusively with Amazon Web Services, Rackspace Public Cloud, and VMware vCloud. It’s been quite a while since I had to […]

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