Yearly Archives: 2011

BREAKING: Apple Acquires Sprint for $32 Billion

In a surprise press release this morning, Apple announced their acquisition of cellular company Sprint for $32 Billion. Sprint, known for its uncertain financial situation, reportedly agreed to an Apple takeover after a private bidding war between Apple and the search giant Google.

Apple has been seeking a way to escape the oppressive policies of the two larger cellular companies, AT&T and Verizon, for some time. The Sprint acquisition will allow them to offer the iPhone without carrier-imposed restrictions on things like tethering and data usage, and may very well lead toward cheaper plans.

In the announcement, Apple stated that they plan to offer unlimited data and voice for $30 per month, with SMS added for an additional $5. Adding additional handsets or other devices (i.e. the iPad) to your plan will cost an additional five to ten dollars per month, depending on the brand and model.

Details are still sparse, but we will cover the news here as it unfolds.

WordPress Admin Bar Plugin Roundup

WordPress 3.1 added an “admin bar” that floats along the top of your blog when you are logged in with an account of sufficient privileges, giving you easy access to frequently-accessed pages in the WordPress admin. It didn’t take long for plugin developers to…

CSS3 Multiple Backgrounds

CSS3 has a nifty feature that I wasn’t aware of until recently: multiple backgrounds per element. This was something I used to wish for frequently before I got used to faking it by nesting DIVs and assigning them single backgrounds. Chris Coyier’s CSS-Tricks blog…

BlogBuzz March 26, 2011

Add Submenus to the WordPress Admin Bar

Want to customize the Admin Bar, added in WordPress 3.1, to make it a bit more useful? Rather than removing it, like some people have sought to do, wouldn’t it make more sense to extend it with some additional submenus? If you head over …

Firefox 4 is Here, and it’s Fast

Just yesterday Mozilla released version four of Firefox, bringing with it a new UI and many changes under the hood. It looks and feels a bit like Chrome, but without losing the customizability that has always set it apart from other browsers. The most…

WP Utility Short Codes Plugin

WP Utility Short Codes is a WordPress plugin that helps you easily add callout boxes to your posts with simple shortcodes. (Some examples here.) Using WordPress short codes, this plugin will allow you to easily insert message boxes and buttons into your WordPress posts…

BlogBuzz March 19, 2011

Google Rolling Out Asynchronous AdSense Ads

Remember when BuySellAds started using non-blocking JavaScript to load advertisements on publisher’s sites? It made a huge difference in the speed pages took to load, since the ads wouldn’t load until all of the important stuff was done. Google is finally doing the same…

Evil JavaScript Trick: The History Nuker

Remember back in the bad old days of the internet, when pop-up ads and other annoyances were around every corner? Some sites, by some flawed logic, would decide that you didn’t really want to leave their website when you clicked the Back button and…