Nerd Alert 75: For the righteous dude in all of us

HOT LINKS

What we're reading this week

  Adam: New life goal: get a pet bear. (Sorry, that link was too good to not share.) On a more serious note, here’s a great post with some questions to ask when interviewing for a remote job, such as, say, our open lead developer position.

  BenRandom A11y Color Palettes generates new color schemes and rates them according to W3C accessibility standards.

  Jack: Are your login credentials for LinkedIn, Tumblr, Adobe, or even the old MySpace account among those now on the market? Find out if you’ve been “pwned.” And maybe it’s time to rethink this password thing.

  Julia: Get a behind-the-scenes look at how the WSJ visuals team created The Hamilton Algorithm – the very fun interactive that analyzes rhymes from ‘Hamilton,’ the ever-popular hip-hop Broadway sensation. (Sorry, Adam.)

  Ryan: Check out John Wheeler’s Flask-Ask if you’re a Pythonist looking to write custom skills for Amazon’s Alexa. Don’t miss the intro video where John also covers the useful-looking ngrok utility.

  Sinduja: This article tells us how to scientifically have a productive day by scheduling different types of tasks that match our body’s circadian rhythms.

  Inndy: The efficient way. The snail way.


SHOUT OUT

Work we admire by our journalism peers

Mozilla just launched the Secure Open Source (SOS) Fund, which will provide security auditing, remediation, and verification for major open source software projects.

Some good news for open government: The US House of Representatives is releasing their financials in machine-readable CSVs.


WE MADE A THING

Our projects, manifest


Plugins galore! This week we released three shiny new WordPress plugins:

Term Debt Consolidator examines your site's tags and categories and groups them by similarity, allowing you to consolidate groups of similar terms down to a single term of your choosing.

Google Analytics Popular Posts queries Google Analytics for your website's pageview data and uses an algorithm – based on publish date and total number of pageviews – to determine a weighted popularity score for a post. Using this scoring mechanism, the plugin generates a list of the most popular posts for a site.

Super Cool Ad Inserter allows site administrators to insert widgets – like ads, newsletter signups, and other calls to action – into posts at set intervals.

All three plugins are available from the WordPress Plugins Directory.


GET A JOB

Good jobs with good people

INN is accepting applications for a senior full stack developer to lead our WordPress work. Join our team!

NPR is hiring a digital editor.

Sunlight Foundation is hiring a quantitative analyst.

MapLight has an opening for a data analyst looking to dive into campaign finance data.

APM is looking for a digital product designer to join the team at Minnesota Public Radio.

Making Contact is hiring an online community manager.


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SOME OTHER STUFF

Gather ye rosebuds

LISTEN: Foil Deer by Speedy Ortiz. Also this remix.

DRINK: Space Coffee. Can't make it into orbit? You can at least try the same beans the astronauts drink.

WATCH: Teens react to Windows 95. It’s now safe to turn off your computer.


The question is: What aren't we going to do?

Happy 30th Anniversary, Ferris.