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HOT LINKS
What we're reading this week
Adam: Last week at SND Makes in Austin, Chris Coyler (of CodePen) blew some minds with his lightning talk on SVG animations. If you’re like me and fairly new at working with SVGs, here are some good tips on creating and exporting them for the web.
Ben: Creativity is about asking questions.
David: Jack has been exploring image optimization to keep INN member sites lean and fast. This shell script uses Homebrew and ImageOptim to shrink images using lossless libraries that don’t alter any pixels.
Jack: After the adblockolypse, revenue for news may have to rely more on voluntary contributions from consumers. How to do this? Maybe make them Tipsy.
Kaeti: Relevant to my interests: writing CSS on growing teams.
Ryan: Among PHP’s 5,000+ built-in functions, you’ll find metaphone: a function that can compare two strings to determine how similar they sound.
Bert: Let's paint some happy little robots.
BE OUR GUEST
This week's guest contributor
Our guest this week is Sean Flynn, the integrations developer for HigherEdJobs.com and a recovering journalist.
Regular expressions can be both a valuable tool and a serious headache. Netscape developer Jamie Zawinski once said, “Some people, when confronted with a problem, think ‘I know, I'll use regular expressions.’ Now they have two problems.”
Zawinski’s frustrations are common, but there is hope! RegexOne has an interactive tutorial that will teach you the basics of regular expressions, and there are a number of invaluable cheat sheets floating around the internet. Pete Freitag wrote one that I used heavily when I was just starting out.
When you’re ready to graduate from interactive tutorials into daily use, regex101.com provides a free online regular expression tester, while UltraPico’s Expresso has proven itself as an invaluable (free!) offline regular expression design and testing tool. And if you just want to shake the rust off your regex skills, how about a few rounds of regex golf?
Just don’t try to parse HTML with regular expressions.
GET A JOB
Good jobs with good people
St. Louis Public Radio is looking for reporting interns this spring.
Maplight seeks a data editor.
Public Source is hiring an interactives and website developer and two editorial positions.
SHOUT OUT
Work we admire by our journalism peers
What is the WordPress REST API? Why is everyone else so excited about it? What can you do with it? From Torque and WPEngine comes a free white paper answering all those questions.
Also, the NPR Visuals Team ran the analytics on their photo slideshow stories.What they found out may surprise you.
SOME OTHER STUFF
Gather ye rosebuds
LISTEN: A concert celebrating 25 years of Studio Ghibli.
COOK: Macaroni Grill's rosemary bread.
GIF: Meet Jennifer, the hockey robot learning to ski:
