Reviving a Wordpress Plugin and Building Competency

As a fun little aside, I decided to resurrect a 'dormant' Wordpress plugin that enables support for including every comment system, ever, in tabs.

The plugin is called Comments Evolved for Wordpress, and was originally called gPlus Comments before adding support for tabbed comments from Facebook, Disqus, Livefyre, Trackbacks, and native Wordpress.  Judging by the 60,000 downloads from the official site, it's been pretty popular.


The plugin hadn't been updated for about a year, and users were complaining that it didn't yet display comment numbers and didn't offer a way to link the Facebook portion to a Facebook App ID, which meant that there was no way to moderate Facebook comments.  This was especially a problem for those seeking to monetize their sites, because many advertising services won't work with sites that can't moderate their own comments.

The New Lab

Two weeks ago, I changed research labs for my graduate studies in Chemical Engineering at UC Berkeley.  The transition has been smooth and painless thanks to some great people on either side of the transfer, and I'm looking forward to spending the next few years in the laboratories of Drs. David Graves and Doug Clark.

A change like this is generally considered to be a Big Deal, but my graduate school experience (aka 'several prime years of my life') will be a much better one as a direct result.  If something in your life is falling flat, draining your energy, failing to inspire you to do your best work... by all means, make a change.  This may require overcoming substantial psychological, social, institutional, or societal inertia.   Do it anyway.  The rest of your life happens exactly once, and there is no time to waste in non-ideal situations — bad school, bad job, bad relationship — that you can change if you take the initiative.  Don't let laziness, a preoccupation with being comfortable, and Status Quo Stockholm Syndrome ruin your life.

This place is a Maker's paradise.  A few photos from my first week of messin':