Ask Matt: Question from Brady

January 19, 2009

Brady Asks:

What causes business cycles?

Talk about a complex question uttered in four simple words.  I’m afraid I may have to take a cop-out on this one.  I don’t really see any way to pinpoint it to one, or even ten specific causes.  The number of variables would be so enormous that I could probably write about the subject all night and still never do the question justice.  And yes, I know I said the economy was fair game in this round, sorry for not having a better answer for you.

Although, I could turn around and say they’re not cycles at all, since a ‘cycle’ implies regularity between the upturns and downturns in the economy.  However there is no, to the best of my knowledge, schedule to the ‘cycles’ we see in the market.

Needless to say however, I wish we weren’t seeing the current downturn we’re all experiencing.

But if you’d like to discuss it further sometime Brady, let’s grab a beer :)

Note: This is part of the Ask Matt series where you, the reader, get to post a question and have me answer it.

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Ask Matt: Question from Ezra

January 19, 2009

Ezra Asks:

Do you know if its possible to turn an email box into an RSS feed?

I’m sure it is.  Although how to go about doing it will depend largely on your email provider.  For instance, if you’re on GMail, there’s an Atom feed available of your mailbox already, although it requires a feed reader capable of authentication for privacy reasons.

For other providers, it might get a little more complex, but it wouldn’t be too bad.  I’m not aware of any services that will do this automatically off the top of my head.   But setting it up on your own wouldn’t be all that complex if you have some PHP knowledge (which I believe you do).  You could use something like this PHP POP3 Class to poll your mailbox then you could use something like SimplePie to create an RSS feed of the data.  I don’t have any experience with the PHP POP3 Class, but I’m sure if it didn’t work out there are likely many more, and probably even IMAP implementations as well.  SimplePie, I have used, and find it to be quite nice.

Note: This is part of the Ask Matt series where you, the reader, get to post a question and have me answer it.

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Ask Matt: Question from Tim

January 19, 2009

Tim Asks:

What is the answer to life, the universe, and everything? Oh and do you have any cool WP plugins coming out?

The answer of course, is 42.  ;)

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aboZctrHfK8

As for WordPress plugins, hopefully I’ll be releasing version 1.4 of WordPress Filter soon.  I think WordPress Filter is a pretty great plugin, mainly because it let’s someone tap into the simpler Plugin functionality, without having to write a full-blown plugin of their own.  Users can even swap filtersets with each other using the import/export functionality that was introduced in v1.3.

Other then that though, I haven’t really thought of any new plugin ideas lately.  I have been giving thought to writing a RSS->Blog Post plugin that will actually WORK then continue to keep it up so there is one out there (most I find either don’t work, or aren’t maintained, it’s frustrating).  Although I’m somewhat hesitant to both write this plugin and release it, since I am fairly certain it would end up being used by spam blogs at some point.

One other plugin I’ve been thinking about is a robust calendar (event calendar) plugin.  I don’t have any direct need for this, but I’ve heard several users complaining about the ones that exist either don’t do enough, or (like RSS->Post), aren’t maintained actively enough to be worth using.  I don’t really see my WordPress ’support’ going away anytime soon, so making one of these and maintaining it might be a good way to give back to the community some.

If you have any plugin ideas, feel free to throw them in the comments though.  Never know, I might get bored one night and write it.

Note: This is part of the Ask Matt series where you, the reader, get to post a question and have me answer it.

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Ask Matt – Ep 5

January 18, 2009

Here’s your chance.  Ask me anything you want in the comments and I will give you an answer.  It can be anything from WordPress to the Economy to Flowers.  There’s no question that is unacceptable.

This post is part of Episode  5 of the weekly Ask Matt Series.

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