On Monday, my wife, Leanne, complete surprised me with an iPad. I had convinced her to go to the Apple store, so I could finally get a chance to at least try out the gadget I had been somewhat obsessed with for the past week or so. She made me promise not to buy one. I said that’d be fine, as I was planning on doing at least a few more weeks of research before really contemplating purchasing one because that’s how I think.

We arrived at the Apple store, and I beelined right toward the iPad display, selecting one in an empty corner so I wouldn’t be interrupted. My wife, who was carrying around our 11 month old son, Maddox, at the time, said she was going to take him for a walk to keep him occupied. I nodded absentmindedly, already completely engrossed with the iPad. At some point (I can’t say when as I honestly lost track of time) she stopped by and asked how it was going and that I should have at least a few more minutes before our son got fussy. I said a quick “Ok!” and she disappeared again.

Now that the iPad has been officially released, I can say with certainty: I want one. I haven’t wanted a piece of technology so bad ever since the Playstation 1 was released over a decade ago. The funny thing is, I’m not exactly sure why.

Part of the reason may be due to the fact that the iPhone is what I consider to be one of the best pieces of technology I have ever used. Call out Apple all you want on their locked down approach to this device, but the result is a nearly perfectly functioning piece of equipment. This was clear to me after jailbreaking the phone: While some of the new capabilities were nice, the phone just wasn’t as stable or fast as it used to be, so I reset it.

Having now developed a few dozen websites using Wordpress as a back-end, I’ve come to find myself installing the same plugins over many of those installations.

Initially finding those plugins was often quite a challenge though. While I often sing the praises of Wordpress, the plugin area of their site is honestly an embarrassment to the platform, if only because there is no way to sort through plugins. Thus one of Wordpress’s biggest benefits – the massive community – becomes a huge problem due to the sheer number of plugins. Without a way to filter or sort, you’re left with a massive list of plugins, the vast majority of which haven’t been updated in years.

During a recent website revision, a client mentioned that they needed a disclaimer on every one of their product pages. Normally, if the product pages were all set to a certain template, it’d be easy enough to just add that disclaimer into the template. Unfortunately, there was no need to make those pages a special template, so they were all just the default template.

Recently, my company upgraded their subscriber database. One of the major advantages of this upgrade is that it let our website communicate directly with our database, meaning that (among other things) our order forms could send their information directly to the database.