That’s right folks, WordCamp Phoenix is coming up this weekend, Fri Feb 24 through Sun Feb 26. Three days of WordPress geeky goodness, including full-day workshops on Friday, the conference on Saturday, and an “unconference” on Sunday.

I’m speaking in the “Jumpstart” track on Saturday at 10:30 am—my topic is Navigating the Theme Landscape:

Learn what types of themes are out there, how to find and choose a theme, and dive into basic modifications to your theme so it fits you perfectly.

See the rest of the talks on the full Saturday schedule; there are three tracks to choose from, and lots of great content.

I’ll also be working the help bar Saturday, from 2:15 pm onward. Come say hi!

Let’s talk WordPress, Arizona. More info: http://2012.phoenix.wordcamp.org/

I talked last Friday about commercial themes on WordPress.com with Ryan Imel of WPCandy, looking back one year after launching the service. Here are the links to listen to the interview.

• Full-length interview: Community Interview with Lance Willett about commercial themes on WordPress.com.
• Shorter version, edited into the latest WPCandy podcast: WPCandy Podcast 31: Moar commercial themes edition.
• And a fun, 10-minute postlude, talking about upcoming WordCamps and people in the WordPress community with hard-to-pronounce names: Aftertaste #2: After the Interview with Lance Willett.

Thank you to Ryan and his crew; they do a superb job of covering all the WordPress news and events, day in and day out.

Reblogged from Andrew Spittle:

When you spend all day working with the same piece of software your definition of what is easy for someone else becomes horribly skewed. Since I started jamming with the CoPress gang in 2009, I have spent thousands of hours staring at a WordPress dashboard. It means much of the WordPress interface is easy for me. That’s dangerous. I try to minimize the number of times I use easy in a support reply. I avoid phrases like “Setting up custom menus is easy…” or “Writing a new post is easy…” There are a few …

“The best support is a conversation.” So true.

Using WordPress to blog, to publish, to communicate things online that once upon a time would have been relegated to an unread private journal (or simply remained unspoken, uncreated, unshared) makes you a part of one of the biggest changes in modern history: the democratization of publishing and the independent web. Every time you click Publish, you are a part of that change, whether you are posting canny political insight or a cat that makes you LOL.

Help Stop SOPA/PIPA

A new year and something new for me. I am joining @artgillespie and @espressojunky at the best little iOS shop in Tucson @tapsquare—
Sam DeVore (@sdevore) December 30, 2011

Projects & Opening Files

mate Quickly open files from the command line—a simple yet powerful technique. You can also use it to send output from other commands into a TextMate document. For example, take stdout and open in TextMate: ls | grep foo | mate. Or just open a file: mate foobar.txt.

Dragging files or folders to TextMate icon on the Dock creates a new project with the selected items. Running mate on a directory or set of files will make a new project in TextMate.

Cmd-t Find a file in a project quickly. Super handy if you have tons of tabs open, or files nested deep inside folders.

Example of Cmd-t to open a file quickly.

Cmd-Ctrl-r Reveal current file in project drawer. Great for when deep down in a nested project and you need to see the context.

HTML

Ctrl-< Make an HTML element from a word file. This is smart enough to know the self-closing tags (img, hr, br, input).

Ctrl-Shift-w Wrap selection in HTML tags. Useful for wrapping a bunch of lines with lis when making a list.

Ctrl-Shift-l Wrap text as a link, taking URL from clipboard.

Cmd-Opt-. Close an element, based on the opening tag.

CSS

Cmd-Shift-c Insert a color value from the OS X color dialog, adding it to the current document as a hexadecimal value.

Ctrl-q Format CSS, also works in other formats like HTML.

! Type an exclamation point then use the tab key to insert !important quickly.

PHP

Cmd-Opt-] Align assignments for code prettification, like in arrays or variable declarations. Select the lines you want to align, and then invoke the command.

Ctrl-Shift-' Toggle single/double quotes. For example, if your cursor is inside the quotes on the word node in code like this: array( "node" ); you would use this command to toggle to single quotes.

Ctrl-Shift-v Check syntax, also works in other formats.

Cmd-/ Comment/uncomment a line or block, also works in other formats.

Esc Complete a word based on the current document. I use this one often, especially for super-long variable names in PHP files; I just type the first few letters of the variable and hit Esc until I find a match.

Text

Ctrl-u Convert text to uppercase. Use Ctrl-Shift-u for lowerase and Ctrl-Opt-u for title case.

F5 Sort lines in the document, with an option to remove duplicates.

Ctrl-s Inline search: keep hitting the same command to find the next result in the document.

Opt-click Select columns and edit. Multi-line editing with column selection in TextMate is pretty sweet. This functionality can save lots of time by editing multiple lines in the document at the same time. It’s hard to explain with text and a screenshot, so here’s a video example: http://macromates.com/screencasts, look for Working With Numbers & Columns.

Commands & Snippets

TextMate is at its best when you extend it with your own snippets and commands to go along with all the great ones that come bundled. For example:

utc Add a UTC time stamp in any file, using `date -u +%D\ %R` UTC as the snippet triggered when you type those letters and hit tab.

bbug Add border: 1px solid red; to a stylesheet for a quick CSS debug in a browser.

See Using TextMate for WordPress Code Cleanup for two useful commands: removing trailing whitespace from files and changing spaces to tabs at the beginning of lines.

Finding commands and snippets within all the options available in TextMate can be challenging—unless you commit their shortcuts to memory. Enter one of my most-used keyboard shortcuts in TextMate (bundles are groups of commands and snippets).

Cmd-Ctrl-t Look up a bundle item, greatly useful if you forget a shortcut, or need to find something obscure. It only shows results for your current file type, but you can override it by typing in ALL CAPS.

I use this one all the time since I don’t want to memorize the shortcut for every possible command or snippet. Instead I just start typing a few words, hit this command, find what I need in the list, then apply it with Enter.

Example of finding a bundle item with Cmd-Ctrl-t.

Much More

There is so much more to TextMate, of course. Macros, Subversion integration, lots of great add-ons like AckMate and ProjectPlus, and the list goes on.

Further reading:

• TextMate Basics Tutorial
• TextMate Screencasts
• TextMate tips and tricks wiki
• Roger Johansson’s TextMate productivity tips
• TextMate shortcuts you should be using

When I started, my goal was to get to 40 WPM to feel comfortable getting my daily work done. With that goal accomplished, I ran drills continually with the MasterKey software, and watched my milestones go by: 50, 60, 70.

Today my average speed in drills—with accuracy—is 75 WPM, very close to what I was with QWERTY before the switch. What I lost in time and energy learning the new layout I’ve gained back in bunches with touch-typing skills and typing confidence. I’ve learned to use the top number row (and its related symbols) much better now, and rarely look down.

I don’t have efficiency stats to compare before and after, but my confidence and speed in typing make me feel great about this decision.

Verdict: typing is fun. Just like any tool I use, I’m aiming to master it—and I’ve found it’s more fun when done with confidence and expertise. Every day is stronger, faster, better.

A child psychologist who is all in favor of new, alternative discipline for kids comes home one day to find his two kids putting their hand prints in the freshly laid sidewalk in front of their house.

As he gives them a good wallop his wife gasps, “I thought you were against punishing your kids that way?!” He replies, “In the abstract, yes—but not in the concrete.”

(First seen in the ever-punderful book Treasury of Atrocious Puns by Bennett Cerf.)

The weird angle to hit Control-a was hurting my hand. Gone now is the left-side contortion I was forced to make to strike with my pinky and ring finger.

It’s pretty easy to change the command key mapping, just add escape ^Bb to your screen config file (usually located in your home directory). Here’s what my .shellrc looks like:

# Make the shell in every window as your login shell
shell -$SHELL

# Instead of Control-a, make the escape/command character be Control-b
escape ^Bb

# Autodetach session on hangup instead of terminating screen completely
autodetach on

# Turn off the splash screen
startup_message off

# Use a 100000-line scrollback buffer
defscrollback 100000