Those of you that follow me on Twitter (and didn’t participate) are probably painfully aware of the amount of tweeting I did this week. It was all for a good cause, though.

Mercedes-Benz hosted a “Tweet-fueled race” to the “big game” (don’t want the NFL to sue me for using their trademarked name). Essentially, from the morning of Wednesday, Feb. 3, 2011 until this evening (Friday, Feb. 5, 2011), four teams challenged their Twitter followers to show support for them and their charities. Each tweet that included your team’s hashtag gave your team a little virtual fuel to make it from their starting point to Dallas, Texas. There were various challenges, such as posting photos of landmarks, Twitter rounds of songs, etc.

As a freelancer or small business, one of the biggest decisions you can make (from a business perspective, at least) is how to track your time and invoice your clients. There are a few really good options out there. Quickbooks Online seems to be a good solution, but it can get pretty expensive pretty quickly. A friend of mine recommended CurdBee, which looks like a pretty nice option, too.

My software of choice, though, is an application called Paymo. Paymo works extremely well, is easy to use, feature-rich and is extremely affordable. There are basically only two reasons you would ever pay to use Paymo. The first would be if you need to issue more than 3 invoices in a month. The other reason would be if you need to allow more than 2 users (yourself and one other) to track their time in the application.

Back in late 2008, I wrote about my first experience using the CodeIgniter framework. Since then, I’ve enjoyed using the framework with PHP — it reminds me of my days programming in ColdFusion.

Today EllisLab and the CodeIgniter team have released the 2.0.0 version of CodeIgniter.

Here’s a list of the main changes from 1.7.3 to 2.0.0:

• Support for PHP 4 is gone, PHP 5.1 is now a requirement.
• CSRF Protection built into the form helper
• Drivers
• Application Packages
• Scaffolding, having been deprecated for a number of versions, has been removed.
• Removed the deprecated Validation Class.
• Plugins have been removed, in favor of Helpers.
• Added routing overrides to the main index.php file, enabling the normal routing to be overridden on a per “index” file basis.
• Added $route[‘404_override’] to allow 404 pages to be handled by controllers.
• 50+ bugs fixed

They also note that this new 2.0.0 version has moved CodeIgniter into a, “much more community-oriented framework than it has been in the past.”

I can’t wait to play with the new version and try out some of the new features and functions.

Yesterday, David Bisset posted a tweet asking the following question:

Is there a function similar to get_the_post_thumbnail for multi-site (to grab a featured image from a post of a particular blog id)?

At the time, it seemed that the best way to do so was to use the Sitewide Tags plugin for WordPress, which, I believe, does offer some functionality similar to this (I haven’t used the plugin, yet, so I can’t say for sure).

A few days ago, I was very happy to officially release a plugin for WordPress into the WP repository. The experience was an interesting one, but the documentation on the process was, for the most part, extremely helpful.

I began by registering my plugin with WordPress on Jan. 11, 2011. Almost a week later, I received approval to add my plugin to the repository. I then checked out the empty SVN repository using TortoiseSVN for Windows, created the appropriate subversion directories, added my previous versions to the “tags” directory and added my current version to the “trunk” directory. I validated my readme file through the WordPress plugin readme validator and then committed my changes to the repository.

WordPress 3.1 will most likely be released in the next few weeks, and it brings with it a few major changes. If you’re a regular WordPress user, you might not immediately notice many of the updates; but if you are a WordPress Multi Site user, or you are a plugin developer, the changes will most likely seem somewhat revolutionary.

The major change for WordPress Multi Site is the isolation of the Network Administration area. The Super Admin menu is going away, and being replaced with an entirely new admin dashboard for Super Admin users. Developers that initially made their plugins compatible with WordPress MU or WordPress Multi Site will need to make some minor modifications in order to make their plugins compatible with WordPress 3.1.

As you probably know by now if you read HTMLCenter or CenterNetworks on a semi-regular basis, I am a happy user of the Virgin Mobile MiFi 2200 with their $40/month unlimited Broadband2Go plan. It’s been a fantastic resource over the last 5 or 6 months; enough so that I even cancelled my satellite Internet service in favor of it. Unfortunately, that may be coming to an end very soon.

All over the Web, you’ll find tutorials explaining how to use the setTimeout() method in JavaScript to set up a timer and using clearTimeout() to cancel that timer. Unfortunately, it’s a little more difficult to find information about pausing and resuming those timers.

You could, of course, cancel the timer and start it all over again; which is probably fine if you’re using timers of short durations. However, if you’ve got a 30 second timer or something, you probably don’t want it to start all over again if someone pauses it at the 29-second mark.

There is a way to pause and resume those timers, though. In order to do so, you need to set a variable to capture the timestamp when the timer begins. Then, when you pause the timer, you need to figure out how much time has passed between the start of the timer and now. Once you resume the timer, you’ll simply pass the amount of time that was left to the new timer.

There are quite a few plug-ins that are capable of displaying lists of posts that are related to the one currently being viewed in WordPress. However, sometimes they might not offer quite enough customization, or they may just be too much overhead for the features they provide.

If you are interested in displaying related posts without a plug-in, you can start with the code shown below; then customize it however you see fit. 

For quite a while, LinkedIn users have had the option to print their profiles or convert them to PDF, allowing them to create quick and dirty résumés from their LinkedIn information. Unfortunately, that feature has never really been customizable, and really outputs an ugly document. Unfortunately, the only other option was to maintain two separate work histories; one on LinkedIn and another in a static document.

However, the folks over at LinkedIn Labs now offer a much better solution. With the LinkedIn Résumé Builder, you can use the information in your LinkedIn profile to build a professional-looking résumé.