Author Archives: Aaron Jorbin

About Aaron Jorbin

Developer and teacher, Aaron speaks around the country on Open Source Software Development. Aaron is currently the Senior Interactivity Engineer for Privia Health where he is focused on building great user experiences. Formerly at AddThis where Aaron worked on publisher products used by fourteen million domains and one point three billion users every month. Aaron has contributed to WordPress and other open source projects including leading development of Phetric and slidedown.js. A graduate of Northern Michigan University, Aaron continues to be involved in higher education by serving as a simulation director for an international education conference. When not in front of his computer, Aaron can often be found with a glass of whisky or beer in his hand discussing international politics, sports and open source software.

Thank You WordPress

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I didn’t set out to blog about WordPress turning 10, but I’m sitting at the airport on my way to jsConf waiting for Koop a friend I met because I got involved in WordPress, just having sent a tweet to Jen Mylo, a friend I met because I got involved in WordPress after spending the weekend with Nacin, Jaquith, Koop and others that I met because I got involved in WordPress.

When I found WordPress I was a recent college grad working 10-15 hours a week as an usher at an arena staying up until 5am at coffee shops trying to throw together a website. Five and a half years later I lead pretty much everything user facing for a small healthcare technology startup. If I hadn’t found WordPress and hadn’t met the people I now consider some of my best friends, I can’t imagine where I would have ended up, but I doubt it would be as great of a place as it is.

I started contributing to WordPress in a meager manner, adding a notification. Since then my contributions have waxed and waned, but I always had the feeling that I was contributing to something bigger.

Thanks WordPress for giving me the freedom to Learn. The freedom to collaborate. The freedom to become the developer I am today with the friends I have.

Speaking at AccessU on Open Source and Accessibility

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Next month I’ll be speaking at AccessU on Open Source Tools for Building Accessible Websites. I’m excited to share my love of two things: Open Source Software and Accessibility. Accessibility to me is a core subject area that all front end developers and designers need to be thinking about. Open Source Software powers the internet. On a daily basis, you are more likely to use an open tool then not and you might not even realize it. This seminar will be in two parts. The first will be looking at Open Source Software, what that term means and some of the tools you’ve most likely used that are open source. We’ll also look at how decisions (focused on accessibility) get made when building open source software and how and why you should be a part of them. The second half will look at how you can build an accessible website using open source software. The focus will be on WordPress and some of the specific challenges with it.

Many of the speakers are leaders in the Accessibility Community that I respect and learn from whenever I see them tweet, speak, or write. It’s an honor to be able to join them for this conference. Y’all should join us in Austin!

A bit more about the conference:

As Austin begins to warm toward summer, there’s no cooler place to be than with the knowledgeable, passionate speakers and instructors for Knowbility’s annual AccessU! Now in its second decade, John Slatin AccessU provides courses and workshops from the world’s best instructors in inclusive Web, document, and media design and development. Whether are a beginner or are looking to hone your existing accessibility skills, Austin is the place to be in May.

What: The 13th Annual John Slatin AccessU Training Conference
When: May 14 and 15 (conference) May 16 (optional post conference sessions)
Where: St Edward’s University, Austin, TX
Cost: $435 for the conference registration until April 25th
$325 for post-conference sessions until April 25th
Full schedule of classes is available on the Knowbility website.

The conference is produced by Knowbility and sponsored by Deque Systems, St Edward’s University, and the Texas Department of Assistive and Rehabilitative Services. The event is a joyful celebration of the empowering potential of digital technology. Y’all come!

Introducing Punchcard.py

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If you haven’t noticed, I like punchcard graphs.  I like them so much, I have a script that to generate them.  I’ve now released this script for everyone to use.

Punchcard.py is simple to use and I hope you find it useful.  It accepts a stream of unix timestamps and creates a punchcard graph. It can very useful if you’re trying to figure out days and times of activity.

How Do I Install punchcard.py?

The easiest way to install punchcard.py is with pip.  Just run

pip install punchcard.py

If you install it manually (by cloning the punchcard.py git repository and running python setup.py install), you’ll also need to install the dependency pygooglechart.

What options are available

The only option that is currently available is to change the filename. To do that, use the -f option like

punchcard.py -f tweets.png

How do I generate a stream of timestamps

For WordPress Posts, I Butchered the WordPress importer plugin. To use this, clone that repo and run

php punchcard.php export_file_name.xml | punchcard.py

For Twitter, I created a similar simple script. I have the script setup for retweets, original tweets and all tweets. I just change the echo line at the end depending on which I want to output. To use this script, I run

php twitter.php archive.csv | punchcard.py

What should I do if I find bugs

Please create a github issue with any bugs you might find. Please make sure to include steps to reproduce including a relevant data source file.

Inspiration

This script is largely just an abstraction of Bash History Punchcard by Matt Behrens. Without his work, this wouldn’t exist.

Final Notes

If you use punchcard.py to create any interesting graphs, tweet @aaronjorbin, I’d love to see that it’s being used.

Beards are good for you

This is medical research I can support.

But think twice before you tell your man to reach for a razor, because beards and moustaches might be beneficial for men’s health.

This is still, it has to be said, an emerging field of thinking — but here, with tongue half in bearded cheek, we reveal the health upside of men’s facial hair…

via Beards are good for you: From warding off pollen to slowing the ageing process | Mail Online.

hat tip: Joe