I’ve just launched The Markdown Tutorial. It’s an interactive tutorial covering the Markdown syntax by John Gruber.

Recently, I found myself using a lot of Markdown in various projects. While searching for instructional material for Markdown, I realized that there weren’t many full-fledged tutorials about Markdown on the web. It seems like most people learn it by using syntax references for the elements they need, and, eventually, they’ve used it enough where they can say that they ‘know’ Markdown. I thought that some people may find a guided approach more effective.

My goal was to get the reader to use enough Markdown in the tutorial that they no longer needed to refer to reference materials for common tasks like emphasizing text, adding code blocks, headers, links, etc. Hopefully, users will find themselves comfortable enough with Markdown to use it in their comment and forum posts, without even realizing that they’ve learned a whole new language.

Please let me know if you have any questions, suggestions, or comments regarding The Markdown Tutorial.

I just launched my first WordPress Plugin. The Donate Everywhere Plugin helps increase donations by adding a link to your PayPal donation page at the end of every post. My goal was to produce a clean, minimal donation plugin that was easy to configure and extend. I took care to include many of the commonly used PayPal HTML variables, including ‘return’, ‘notify_url’, ‘cbt’. You can set these advanced options directly from the plugin admin page. Please let me know if you have any suggestions for further improvements.

Runtime shared libraries enable ActionScript programmers to separate the design and development aspects of their project. The designer can work on the graphics in the shared library, while the programmer codes the functionality elsewhere. This can be useful for small projects, but it is essential for larger projects that can become unwieldy if your assets are not properly organized. This tutorial will walk you through setting up a runtime shared library and loading it into a simple project. Read more »

Problem: “I want to build my own WordPress plugin, but after sifting through the WordPress documentation, I don’t really know where to start.”

WordPress plugins are a fantastic way to add new functionality to your website, but approaching plugins for the first time can be daunting, even for experienced programmers. This quickstart tutorial provides a step-by-step guide to creating a WordPress plugin from scratch. It is designed for WordPress users who have never built a plugin before, but have had some experience with PHP. The goal of this tutorial is to get a simple plugin operational in a minimal amount of time. For all of the details on building a plugin, see the WordPress plugin How To.

By the end of this tutorial, you will have a basic understanding of how to extend WordPress functionality with plugins, how to set options via the WordPress database, as well as how to define an admin menu for your plugin. Read more »

In Flash, you can manipulate your SWF’s alignment and scale mode using the native ’stage.scaleMode’ and ’stage.align’ properties, but what happens when you need to align/scale individual display objects in your movie? ActionScript doesn’t provide any built-in functionality for that, so I created a few custom layout classes to handle aligning and scaling arbitrary display objects. I present these to you here, in hopes that it will save you some time writing your own layout utilities, or at least provide a starting point for your custom applications. Read more »

The Flint Particle System has a vast assortment of built-in behaviors. Most of the time, you can accomplish your desired effect with these behaviors, but if you want to build something truly unique, you’re going to have to create your own customized behaviors. This tutorial will guide you through the process of creating custom Action/Initializer classes, using InitializerGroups to create different types of particles with a single Emitter, interacting with particles through keyboard input, and leveraging the advanced features of the Flint Particle System. Read more »

Problem: Create a SWC library from your existing AS3 code. A SWC library is a pre-compiled file of classes and (optionally) graphical assets. They are useful for creating themes (see Creating Themes), distributing an application without distributing its source code, or for creating a compressed copy of your code library. As an example, the Flare library ships with a pre-compiled SWC that contains the entire library in one SWC file. If you’re worried about efficiency, compiling against a SWC library works exactly the same as compiling from source: only classes that you actually use are included in your final SWF. If you have a reusable code base that you want to compile into a single file, SWC’s are for you.

Solution: Flex Ant tasks. Read more »

WebFaction is a fantastic hosting service. They offer up a huge collection of built-in “apps,” including a Django app that will install Django at the click of a mouse. Unfortunately, their built-in Django apps don’t ship with anything newer than Python2.5.

Problem: Configure a Django installation that uses Python2.6 (or higher) on a WebFaction server. Read more »

Changing your default favicon is one of those subtle, but important details in customizing your website. In case you were wondering, your favicon is that little icon that is displayed next to the url when people visit your site. You should be able to see my favicon next to the url right now:

Problem: Change your WordPress favicon.

Solution: Upload your favicon to wordpress/wp-content/themes/your_theme/images/favicon.png. Then, change this line in your theme’s header.php:

to

Details: In the above code, the line

returns the path to your template directory (e.g., wordpress/wp-content/themes/classic). This should be used instead of actually typing out the full path, which will not work.

Favicons should be square images, typically not larger than 22×22 pixels.