Two of my courses on lynda.com were updated recently, and next week, with a free LinkedIn account, you'll be able to watch them, and the rest of the lynda.com training library, for free! They're running the Week of Learning promotion next week, from October 24 - 30, to promote LinkedIn Learning, which is the entire lynda.com catalog geared toward the LinkedIn audience.

This was a very busy weekend. I spoke at WordCamp Orange County on how to use a debugger, and it went well. If you were there, or if you're just interested, you can view the slides here, and fork them on GitHub.

This Wednesday, June 11, I'll be speaking at the downtown meetup of jQuery LA. I'll be showing a relatively simple jQuery filter that does something useful with images, and show how it can be converted into a plugin without a whole lot of hassle. Then you can take that plugin and reuse it on other projects more easily, and even distribute it through the jQuery plugins registry, your GitHub account, or wherever you like.

Close on the heels of JavaScript for Web Designers, jQuery for Web Designers is now available.

I'm delighted to announce that my new course, JavaScript for Web Designers, is now available in the lynda.com online training library.

If you're a web designer comfortable with HTML and CSS, and want to learn how to add interactivity to your projects, this course will help you do that. You're not going to master the entire language and everything it can do in three hours, but it will get you rolling in a hurry, developing your intuition and understanding of using JavaScript on the web. Using this course as a foundation, you can move further into the world of writing code for web browsers, and making all kinds of cool stuff on the web.

There are many free videos available, so you can listen to the melodious sound of my voice and get a feel for the examples and teaching style. Check it out!

Last night, I spoke at a joint meetup of Hollywood WordPress and LA WordPress 101. I called it "Everything I Always Wanted to Know About WordPress (but only learned through experience)", but the main point was to give people who are new (or newish) to WordPress some tips and tricks on how to use it, and ways to proceed when they need to start customizing it.

This is my recording of the talk itself, basically a screencast of the slides. The organizers also shot video where you can see me, and if I get my hands on it, I'll update this post.

Download the slides here

In my introductory WordPress course, in first video on WordPress security tweaks (the third video of the third chapter — it's one you need to have bought the course to see), there is some sample Apache configuration shown which is not included in the course files. This was an oversight on my part; we tried to provide everything you would need to save re-typing errors, and this one slipped through the cracks.

I gave a presentation on child themes in WordPress tonight at the SoCal WordPress meetup, and it seemed to go well. Except for one thing: I left Screenflow in pause the whole time.

sad trombone

I promised to record this presentation, and I'm not going to let my incompetence get in the way of a promise. So here it is, re-recorded at home.

I'm happy to announce that Drupal Power Workshop, my latest video training course for Drupal, is now available. It's just under five hours long, and is the first of these courses to be recorded at the video2brain offices in Graz, Austria.