REmail

I’m so tired of doing this kind of thing in silos. Email is mine. Google+ is Google’s. In terms of location, I feel like I’m in a corporate setting in Google+, and I feel like I’m at home when I’m in email. The reason, aside from design differences, is that email is free-as-in-freedom. Its protocols are NEA: Nobody owns them, Everybody can use them, and Anybody can improve them. Not the case with these commercial Web dairy farms. – Doc Searls

Each day, there’s some number of Google+, Linkedin, Facebook, and Twitter notifications in my email inbox. Ironic that these communications services, seemingly wanting to be as ubiquitous as email, need to use email as a primary notification service.

And the daily deal space (Groupon, Living Social, et. al.) are 95% email.

Every couple of days, I’m asked, ‘What comes after Twitter, Facebook, (etc)?’

I don’t know, I’m in email.

How to Share Sidebars Across a WordPress Network

On a recent WordPress Network (WPMU) project, I’ve needed to display the same sidebar and associated widgets across all the sites in the entire network.

Since switch_to_blog() has been deprecated and an attempt at monkey-patching sent me deeper into the bowels of WordPress than I felt was warranted…

I turned all the necessary widgets into pages and used get_blog_post($blog_id, $post_id) to build the widgets by hand.


<?php $posts = array(5304, 5322, 5309, 5310, 5301, 5299); foreach ($posts as $post_id) : ?>
<?php $post = get_blog_post(1, $post_id ); setup_postdata($post); ?>
<div class="widget">
<h4><?php the_title(); ?></h4>
<div class="textwidget">
<?php the_content(); ?>
</div>
</div><!-- widget -->
<?php endforeach; ?>

The downside – widgets need to be manually added, moved, and removed from the array.

The upside – it works.