After completing this guide, you’ll be able to set a photo in a custom field that will be used as the photo that gets shared to Pinterest.

First, you need to enable WordPress custom fields. We’ll use this to add the URL of the image we want to share. If you don’t have them enabled already, go here to learn more about them. Once you have custom fields enabled, keep on reading.

Next, add a new post so that you can create your new field and register it with your site. Below the text-writing window of your new post, you should see the Custom Fields area. Click Enter new and name the new field share_image. (You can call it whatever you want, but for the purposes of this article we’ll use share_image). Here’s a picture of what you should see:

Now we need to open up our theme folder and find the correct files to work with. I’m using Twenty Ten so I need loop.php for the main blog page, and loop-single.php for a single post. Hopefully your theme files are well-named and it is easy for you to find out where you need to be. If you don’t know, find out before moving forward.

The code for the button comes straight from Pinterest. All we’re doing is replacing their static text with some PHP. At the top of your appropriate theme files, add Pinterest’s JavaScript (outisde of the PHP tags). It looks like this:

Now find the area of the post where you want your button to go. I wanted mine to go below the post date, so I looked for HTML markup like entry-title and entry-author to help me figure out where that was. Once you find that place, paste the following code:

That’s it for the code. If you’re interested in what all that does, keep reading this paragraph. If not, skip to the next one. With WordPress Custom Fields, you have access to that data in the form of a big associative array. I created a variable for that array and then just referenced the appropriate array elements for the image and description (which is the blog post title). The post URL is located in a different data object, so I used a different function for that. Additionally, since we only want to show the button when there’s an image, we’ll check to make sure the image array element is not null.

To put your new Pinterest button to use, just start a new blog post and add the URL for your image as a share_image custom field. If your image doesn’t have a URL yet, because you just uploaded it for this post, then publish your post, get the URL for image (by right clicking the image, opening it in a new tab, or your favorite method for getting image URLs) and edit the post to add it. That’s what I do, and it’s working great. Enjoy!

If this post helped you at all, please consider sharing my new iPad app. Thanks!

The Groove Clock is easy to use, because there’s not much to it. Just turn it on and leave it there. You can quickly change the background color if you prefer something lighter, and the clock face will adjust itself for perfect contrast. It’s Apple TV-enabled, and  of course it’s free of ads.

We’ll be adding some nice surprises in the near future without sacrificing the essence of the Groove Clock. It’s available now in the app store. We appreciate your support and hope you enjoy your Groove Clock!

The rest of the photos are here and here.

The problem with specialization is that cultural literacy is starting to disappear…there are fewer facts and references that you know everyone will know. Even something like TV–there are 175 channels instead of 3. This means it’s harder to communicate. It’s harder to get to know people.

I get where he’s coming from. I used to play the guitar a lot more than I do today. I picked it up at a young age, learning basic rock & blues songs, scales, etc, and I ended up being pretty adept with a pick. Everything changed when I went to Spain to study flamenco. All of a sudden I had five picks as my fingers and the possibilities were limitless. After I became skilled at flamenco I was able to start fingerpicking the blues, Reverend Gary Davis type stuff, classical, jazz, and composing became a lot easier.

Had I not dropped the pick none of that would happened. I would have blissfully, albeit naively, carried on mimicking Richards, Knopfler, etc. I didn’t realize until years after I got back from Spain the value of variety. Learning a variety of styles introduced me to a variety of people. The same is true of my career now. I consider myself to be a blend of interaction designer and software engineer, and while there aren’t any job descriptions out there calling for both skillsets, I get to work with many different types of people. I like it this way.

my 1954 Martin

I’ve recently been doing some collaborative storyboarding for an upcoming documentary. I created this template that can be printed, cut with scissors, and distributed to the members of your group. The frames can be rearranged until you figure out how to best tell the story. You can get the full-sized PDF here.