Author Archives: Jake Spurlock

Jake is a geek, designer, HTML+CSS lover. Taker of photos, and sometimes skiing and biking... He spends his time day dreaming new WordPress themes and camping with the Boy Scouts. For some random posts, check out the link blog.

Before Solving a Problem, Make Sure You’ve Got the Right Problem

Some smart thinking from Tim O’Reilly about SOPA

In my experience at OReilly, the losses due to piracy are far outweighed by the benefits of the free flow of information, which makes the world richer, and develops new markets for legitimate content. Most of the people who are downloading unauthorized copies of OReilly books would never have paid us for them anyway; meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of others are buying content from us, many of them in countries that we were never able to do business with when our products were not available in digital form.

via Tim OReilly – Google+ – Before Solving a Problem, Make Sure Youve Got the Right….

‘Misdirection, Doublespeak, Non-Answers, and Straight Up Bad Decisions’

They have really great projects that they start, but they seem to lack on idea of what the use case is, or the follow through needed to make them a success. Search+ seems like one of those things that the engineers pushed through without thinking about the ramifications.

I would argue that this was a decision made by the marketing department, and not by the engineers. If Google was being run my engineers, it might still look like this.

via ‘Misdirection, Doublespeak, Non-Answers, and Straight Up Bad Decisions’ — The Brooks Review.

Beth on Brushes

Love this great example of how using an iPad teaches fine art for kids. There are so many great reasons for kids to have an iPad. What they can learn and how they can develop is still being discovered. I love watching Rush interact. Even at two, before he could form a sentence he knew how to play games and watch video.

Beth is four years old. Four.

via Fraser Speirs – Blog – Beth on Brushes.

When Google comes calling…

Its almost never about technology. Many companies that are built on tech believe that its the tech that enabled them to succeed. This is almost never true I know, Im biased. Its marketing and stories and connection and tribes and commitment and structure that build businesses. The technology is essential, but its not nearly enough.

via Seths Blog: When Google comes calling….

YouTube Embederrator

Needed a simple WordPress function to provide a way to build a YouTube video embed. This is a nice little trick. All you need to do is add a custom field that has a key of Big_Video and the value of the ID of the YouTube video.

[php]
function js_youtube_embed($width,$height) {
global $wp_query;
$big_video = get_post_custom_values(‘Big_Video’);
?>
<iframe width="<?php echo $width; ?>" height="<?php echo $height; ?>" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/<?php echo $big_video[0]; ?>?showinfo=0&hd=1" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
<?php } ?>
[/php]

Example, if this is your YouTube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1p6A7X64Qg, you would use C1p6A7X64Qg as the value.

In you template, the function would look like this:

[php]
js_youtube_embed(‘940’, ‘528’);
[/php]

The two values are the size of the video that you want embedded. So, in this case 940×528.