The Unsplash License is Not GPL Compatible

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. Please consider what follows my unqualified opinion.

I’ve long been impressed with Unsplash. From to the quality of the photos, to the sheer size of the collection, to the freedom of the licensing, all the way to the user experience of the website itself.

As a WordPress theme author who strictly complies with the “100% GPL” rules of both WordPress.org and WordPress.com, Unsplash was a godsend.

I knew I could always count on Unsplash for high-quality photography, without any worry of violating licensing-related rules, because their photos were licensed under cc0.

However, Unsplash recently changed their license, which includes the following sentence:

This license does not include the right to compile photos from Unsplash to replicate a similar or competing service.

This should be deeply concerning to anyone using an Unsplash photo from here on out.

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Let’s Encrypt is Awesome

Leland.me is now running over HTTPS, making it the last of my main websites (the others being Themetry and WP Chat) to be served over an insecure protocol.

I set it up using Let’s Encrypt, a new certificate authority that’s been generating a lot of buzz lately.

And for good reason: SSL certificates typically cost money and have a lot of manual, tedious installation steps.

Let’s Encrypt certificates are not only free, but many of those aforementioned tedious installation steps are automated.

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Emoji Domains: The Definitive Buyer’s Guide

Emoji have taken the world by storm in recent years, so it’s no surprise to see Emoji make an appearance in one of the cornerstones of the Internet: domain names.

In this blog post, we’ll cover some Emoji domain history, information on buying Emoji domains, and explain why you might want to own one.

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Running Discourse over HTTPS

Update 3/10/17: While this article is still accurate, you should probably just use Let’s Encrypt instead. Discourse makes it easy, and eliminates many of the steps covered below. It’s also free.

So I recently started running WPChat over HTTPS. This will basically serve as a noob version of the documentation already provided in the allowing SSL for your Discourse Docker setup guide by Discourse co-founder, Sam Saffron.

Not even Discourse supports non-Docker installs anymore, so I won’t either. If you installed Discourse a long time ago without Docker, get up to speed. As I covered in my WPChat launch post, I’ve already done this.

Luckily, Discourse already has a lot of HTTPS features already baked in. It’s just a matter of you enabling it.

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The Relaunch of WPChat, powered by Discourse

WPChat was a website I started a while ago to discuss WordPress topics in a live chatroom.

After testing a few “plugins” for live chats within WordPress, it eventually turned into a page with an embedded iframe to a freenode IRC channel.

This is what it looked like:

wpchat-old

It was pretty popular among a good chunk of people in the WordPress community, but has been relatively dormant for a few years now.

I’ve decided to relaunch the site, using Discourse as a platform. Whether it catches on or not is anybody’s guess, but I did learn a thing or too in the install process.

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Six Years Of Theme Lab

I once said, that I’d never sell Theme Lab unless I received an offer so good that it would be dumb for me to turn it down.

Now that the cat is out of the bag, I can confidently say I stayed true to that statement.

It was difficult to let it go, that’s for sure. I often described Theme Lab as my “baby” …as weird as that sounds, I couldn’t think of a better way to describe what it meant to me.

I started it when I was still in high school. I’m now a college graduate, doing real world stuff now. It’s been a while.

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How To Unsuck Your Brand New Windows 8 Laptop

Laugh all you want, but I’ve always been a Windows guy, and for the past six years I’ve used a Windows Vista laptop for 100% of my web development work. This weekend, I bought a brand new Windows 8 laptop.

It was a cheap one. An HP Pavilion, with tax, totaled up to less than $400 from Best Buy. I thought I had gotten a steal.

When I first unpacked it and started it up, I was shocked to realize that the internet was actually slower on this brand new laptop than my six-year-old one. I’m talking about cripplingly slow. I could’ve probably dusted off my old Windows 98 box, connected to an old-school dialup account from AOL (apparently they still do that) and it would’ve been faster.

With some Windows update magic, I’m writing this from my new laptop with a respectable 10 MBPS download speed. What follows are my step by step instructions on how I “unsucked” it:

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