Be the change.

A few days ago I clicked a link in Twitter to read this post wondering where the women in WordPress are. Since I am one, I’m pretty interested in the topic.

After all, there’s a gender gap in pretty much every industry. Even though we make up 57% of all college graduates, leave with a higher GPA and pay the same amount for our educations we still make 77 cents for every dollar a man earns. That’s a loss of almost half a million dollars over a 40 year career.

I mean, for God’s sake, a few days ago Steve Kush, the executive director of the Bernalillo County Republican Party in New Mexico, called a 19-year-old Working America volunteer a “radical bitch” on Twitter, following it up with a tweet about how she was “hot enough to almost make me register democrat”. And that’s not tech. That’s every single industry there is. But after reading the post, I didn’t see my experience as a woman in WordPress reflected in it. So I decided to write about *my* experience as a woman who has worked on the web for 17 years and WordPress for the last five.

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Turn out the lights…

“When you are through changing, you are through.”–Bruce Barton

Today is the end of an era for us at Creativity Included. Our flagship Genesis child themes, Family Tree and Bee Crafty are going to be retired. As much fun as they’ve been, it’s time to let them go.

In December I went on my annual “Self/Business-Improvement” campaign, and read a blog post by Chris Lema called Success In 2013: Focus on What You Do Best. I wanted to answer the question as honestly as I could, so I made a list of my strengths and weaknesses as a designer to answer that question. And I after looking at everything I realized while I was a pretty good theme designer, what I was *best* at was solving client problems.

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CSS Hat is Freaking Awesome

I have to admit, I wasn’t expecting much when I the clicked “Buy Now” button on the CSS Hat web site.

I’ve seen scores of other companies try to address the problem of PSD to CSS conversion, and so far hadn’t found one that put out code that was up to my standards. But CSS Hat came recommended by the OCWP group, and those folks really know their stuff, so I figured I’d give it a shot. It seemed like it would be worth a $30 gamble if it really did what it said it did.

After trying it out for a bit, all I can say is holy cow, does it deliver! I was able to translate the image-based submit button a client has been using into pure CSS in less than 5 minutes. Sure, I had to tweak a couple of rules and add a couple of others, but all in all, it saved me probably 10 minutes of typing in code, searching CSS Tricks for how that border-clip thing worked again and visiting a CSS3 shadow and gradient generator.

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