This Week at WPUniversity is a regular look back at the discussions, links, and stories we’ve shared over the last seven days. Links are sourced from our HipChat, tweets, and Facebook updates.
Things We Wrote This Week
Our WordCamp 101 series continues! Some advice for choosing a venue, providing food n’ drink, and assembling your camp’s website.
More WordPress basics from Sandy. Our intern continues her WordPress learning experience with tips on content strategy.
What hosting providers do we recommend? We’re asked that question a lot, and now we have a post for it!
Building Things on the Web
Improving Performance with Responsive Images: Check out David Newton’s slide deck from the recent Web Performance Toronto meetup.
No, you can’t have a custom site for $300 in two days. Inspirational blogger and WordCamp presenter extraordinaire Chris Lema talks about expectations vs. reality when dealing with small budgets.
Matt Mullenweg on the four freedoms: “Open source abdicates your flexibility as a developer to better serve the people who actually use your products. You can see that as a constraint… or you can see it as a door to iteration, innovation, and constant progress.” Read his full post.
A curated collection of 50+ resources for learning web design. A comprehensive list of articles, guides, tutorials, videos, classes… so much stuff!
Free stock photos you can drag screenshots into. A free-to-use tool for composing slick “our app in the wild” photographs.
The Wonderful World of WordPress
DradCast is back, n’ better than ever. The weekly podcast dedicated to all things WordPress is back on the air with support from WP Engine, Sucuri, and WebDevStudios. Check out Episode 30, their first show of 2014.
Front-end editor for WordPress gets major updates. This feature-as-a-plugin is under ongoing development, and the progress is impressive.
Blogging for SEO? You’re doing it wrong. Use WordPress as a CMS and produce better content. The folks at airpair go into more detail in this article.
Other Tech-Related (and not-so-tech-related) Goodies
YouTube loading slowly? It might be your ISP. Google’s Video Streaming Quality Results tool lets you compare YouTube streaming performance between ISPs in your area.
Behind the scenes: Trello is faster. Here’s why. Fog Creek Software spent a week making their Trello app (which we use religiously, by the way) faster for everyone. This is how they did it.
Mood-based ads on your Apple devices? There’s a patent for that. “This method infers the mood of the user by monitoring phone activities, and this mood sentiment information would provide advertisers with a powerful consumer intelligence metric they could use to deliver targeted content. ” Oft-repeated comment? Hopefully it detects that we’re not in a mood to see ads.
Two toilets per stall at the Sochi games? That appears to be what this photo is implying. Pass the toilet paper, eh?
Photo credit: Paul on Flickr
