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The Yahoo! Media Player is an excellent tool for bloggers that embeds a collapsible media player that can play back any links to music files. They’ve recently updated the player with a ton of new functionality, including the ability to play YouTube videos and Yahoo! movie pages. While the player can be enabled by including a simple line javascript, I’ve created a Wordpress plugin to make the process of installation and management even easier. I’ve updated my plugin to take advantage of some of this new functionality, and will continue to add features to control the API. You can read more about the product here.
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Exciting news today. My Lego design blog, brickd.com, is now a featured site on the excellent Pulse app for iPhone, iPad, and Android. The site can be found in the “Fun” category, and many thanks to the folks at Alphonso Labs for helping make this happen. Please check out the app, add Brickd, and tell your friends!
I’m happy to announce that I’m now a Senior Product Manager on the Digital Entertainment and Games team for the BBC Worldwide. While the title may be a mouthful, in essence my job is to help develop engaging games and social experiences for the stable of BBC brands and content. Leaving Gravity was not an easy decision, but as the company took the necessary steps to position itself for success I found myself being pulled in a different direction. They are building a fantastic platform and have a talented team in place, and I am confident that they can succeed as they execute on the vision the leadership has in place.
For me, nothing makes me happier than creating innovative products that people love to use. With shows like Top Gear and Doctor Who, properties like Lonely Planet, and the top-notch news and information that the company is known for, it was an opportunity I couldn’t resist. While I can’t yet say much about what exactly I’m working on, I’m beyond exited about the role. As a fan of their beloved brands and their technological leadership in the digital space, I promise that I’ll be up to some really interesting things.
So stay tuned for some exciting announcements. Now I’ve got to bunker down, learn to drive on the other side of the road, and get back to work.
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I’m a big fan of Lego. If you haven’t check out my other blog, Brickd, you should definitely give it a look. I decided my iPhone 4 needed some Lego love, so I put together these iPhone 4 wallpapers for the lock screen and background. I’ve optimized them for the iPhone 4’s Retina display, so they’ll look great. Enjoy!
Download the theme from this page
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I realized yesterday that I had been hacked. It was a particularly nasty piece of code known as the “Pharma Hack” that cleverly only targeted the Googlebot, so the infection wasn’t noticeable until I checked my own site in Google Search. It is a fairly diabolical script that initially masks itself as a PHP file associated with one of your plugins. It then injects code into your server in base64 and also mirrored, so it appears as gibberish. The code is then flipped when it is called, and injects spammy links when crawled by Google.
It was an incredibly disarming and anxiety-inducing experience, since I’m always careful to upgrade all plugins and Wordpress as soon as updates are available. I think the malware may have snuck in with an evil plugin, but I’m still working to evaluate the cause.
Luckily, I have a cron job setup to backup my entire site and all databases every night, so I did have a plan B if needed. Ultimately, I found an amazing guide here. If you should also find yourself affected, definitely check it out.
So I think I finally fixed everything. I know have to wait for Google to reindex my site and hope that I don’t get dinged.
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