It’s almost two weeks till Christmas, and Chief Ike’s Mambo Room in the Adams Morgan neighborhood of D.C. has hung up its stockings.

There are loads of them—maybe two dozen, dangling out of arm’s reach above the cluttered bar and along an opposite wall. Each bears a name – Doug, Angela, D-Rok, Baby G – painted in glitter glue.

I ask the bar’s white-bearded owner, Allan Jirikowic ’77, interdisciplinary studies, (who has probably withstood his share of Santa Claus comparisons) about the stockings, but he would rather talk about a mural – one of many – he’s commissioned for the D.C. dive bar he’s owned for 23 years.

“You have Marion Barry riding on the Lion of Judah, next to Fidel Castro with Nixon and Elvis,” Jirikowic says, gesturing toward the painting’s characters. “And over there, Nikita Khrushchev.”

Jirikowic grew up in Silver Spring and enrolled at UMBC in 1972. He studied under Herbert Blau, the forward-thinking theater director who led the university’s arts and humanities division from 1974 to 1978.  “I was about to drop out,” he says, until Blau came aboard and shook things up for him.

When Jirikowic graduated in 1976, he still didn’t know what to do. “I was in a complete quandary,” he says, chuckling. But eventually he drifted back down to the District, where as a bar owner, actor, gadfly and Falstaffian bon viveur, Jirikowic has helped build numerous institutions that have jostled the culture of the often-stodgy federal city. He has also gotten a lot of people drunk.

With his friend Bill Warrell, Jirikowic helped launch and manage the influential downtown art hub d.c. space in a part of the city still shell-shocked after the 1968 riots. The venue brought hundreds of shows to D.C., including an early performance by Laurie Anderson. But after several years at dc space, he began to wonder what was next.

So Jirikowic bartended elsewhere. Couriered. At one point, he even appraised houses. He loathed that, mostly, but it helped him understand certain cold facts of life. “It gave me an immense education about how this country really works,” he says.

In 1988, Jirikowic threw his weight behind a new enterprise: a rooftop bar in Adams Morgan that he called Krakatoa Lounge. A Washington Post feature observed that Krakatoa resembled “a high school gym that’s been decorated for a very ‘80s dance.” The bar was a success – Jirikowic guesses he sold more than 6,000 daiquiris in one season – but a short-lived one.

Subsequently Jirikowic launched more watering holes: the landmark Adams Morgan bar, Hell, and a fiesta-themed joint called Rancho Deluxe. He also made himself a fixture on local stages as an actor, involving himself in scrappy theater organizations such as Studio Theatre and the Capital Fringe Festival, which have become major forces in the D.C. arts scene.

On the cusp of the 1990s, Jirikowic leased a building on the 1700 block of Columbia Road NW, and transformed it and an abutting property into three conceptual bars: Chaos, Pandemonium, and later, Chief Ike’s, which is named after former President Eisenhower. He decorated them lavishly, some of his decor salvaged from junk yards or simply found around town. The tacky Chief Ike’s and its two upstairs bars draw a loyal (and perpetually under-35) customer base.

Often to the chagrin of his neighbors, Jirikowic has become a fierce protector of Adams Morgan bacchanalia. He favors life, liberty, art, and dance, and the business that comes with them. He’s a member of the board of the neighborhood’s business improvement district and also heads up his local citizens’ association.

“I have to be politically active to protect the interests of the right to party, for art, for the joie de vivre of the neighborhood,” he says.

After a motley career spent as the life of D.C’s art scene and its party, Jirikowic sometimes wonders if he should have done something more conventional.

“You know it’s kind of funny,” Jirikowic says. “You just do what you do, and then all of a sudden it’s what you’ve done.”

– Ally Schweitzer

Read the full issue of the Winter 2014 UMBC Magazine.

Slated as a substitute to JavaScript framework, GSS was created to improve Web UI development by fixing CSS's inherent layout issues.

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Our skills — not a college degree — make us valuable to employers.

That’s what we’ve heard from Treehouse students over and over again: The knowledge you’ve gained at Treehouse has helped you find jobs and secure freelance work.

If you’ve found a job or boosted your earnings because of your Treehouse education, we’re interested in your story.

We’re looking for students who have great personal stories to tell about how they’ve skipped traditional education at a four-year university in favor of learning at Treehouse. If you do have a college degree in an unrelated field and have since used Treehouse to get ahead, we want to hear your story, too.

We’ll pick a handful of the best to share in a story here on Treehouse.

If you’re interested, email us at blog@teamtreehouse.com. Please use ”My Treehouse Story” as your subject line.

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• your name
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The post Has Treehouse Helped You Find Work? Share Your Story With Us appeared first on Treehouse Blog.

The following post is guest co-authored by Tim Evko (@tevkor). WordPress has a built-in media uploading system. When you upload an image, it automatically creates and saves different versions of it. Tim will show us how we can customize and exploit that ability to help us with responsive images in content.

If you're like me, and you're tasked with building responsive website that's relatively easy to update, WordPress is most often the CMS you will be building that website on. If you're more like me, you probably skipped over a responsive image solution in favor of making things easier for whomever will be doing the updating. Fortunately, with a few lines of PHP and some JavaScript, you can now add automatic responsive image functionality to your WordPress site.

Here I'll show you how to add support for responsive images to your WordPress site in the form of a small WordPress plugin.

The Markup we ultimately want

We'll be using the Picturefill library here. For now, we'll use the markup that library suggests, which closely mimics what the <picture> element will soon be.

<span data-picture data-alt="A giant stone face at The Bayon temple in Angkor Thom, Cambodia">
      <span data-src="small.jpg"></span>
      <span data-src="medium.jpg"     data-media="(min-width: 400px)"></span>
      <span data-src="large.jpg"      data-media="(min-width: 800px)"></span>
      <span data-src="extralarge.jpg" data-media="(min-width: 1000px)"></span>
    
      <!-- Fallback content for non-JS browsers. Same img src as the initial, unqualified source element. -->
      <noscript>
        <img src="small.jpg" alt="A giant stone face at The Bayon temple in Angkor Thom, Cambodia">
      </noscript>
    </span>

Eventually we can update all this to use the <picture> syntax once Picturefill is ready for it.

What we're not going to do is use that markup directly in blog posts, we're going to get WordPress to help us with that.

The Theme

All you need to do in your theme is make sure this one-liner is present in its functions.php file:

add_theme_support('post-thumbnails');

This will ensure that your theme gives WordPress permission to resize the uploaded images. Without it, the plugin won't work.

The Plugin

This makes sense to do as a WordPress plugin, because we'll want to keep it active no matter what theme is active. We can make it a folder with a PHP file in there to be the plugin code itself, and a copy of the Picturefill library:

Adding the library

Queue it up responsibility:

function get_picturefill() {
      wp_enqueue_script('picturefill', plugins_url( '/js/picturefill.js', __FILE__ ));
    }
    add_action('init', 'get_picturefill');

That will ensure WordPress loads up this JavaScript library on the front end.

Define sizes

Tell WordPress what size images you want created upon uploading:

add_image_size('large-img', 1000, 702);
    add_image_size('medium-img', 700, 372);
    add_image_size('small-img', 300, 200);

You can set this up however you like. add_image_size has a variety of parameters you can adjust. In the case of a 1024x768 bunny rabbit JPG I uploaded, a bunch of versions get created:

Making a [shortcode]

Let's extend this plugin, giving it some real functionality, by making a responsive images shortcode. That way we can put this right in the post content:

[responsive imageid="12" size1="0" size2="500" size3="1000"]

and it will output the markup we need for Picturefill.

We'll split this up into two functions. One to define the shortcode and what HTML to output, and one specifically to loop through and output the image sources.

function getPictureSrcs($image, $mappings) {
      $arr = array();
      
      // Loop through all of our images sizes and store each one of them as a php variable, In which each image size corresponds to a specific type. Mappings is defined later on
      foreach ($mappings as $size => $type)
      {
        // we're using 'wp_get_attachment_image_src();' to get the image we uploaded
        $imageSrc = wp_get_attachment_image_src($image, $type);
        $arr[] ='<span data-src="'. $imageSrc[0] . ' "data-media="(min-width:'. $size .'px)"></span>';
      }
      return implode($arr);
    }
      
    // Enable the [responsive] shortcode
    function responsiveShortcode($atts) {
    
      extract(shortcode_atts(array(
      // In this array, we're creating the parameters to be passed into the shortcode tag  
        'imageid'    => 1,
        // You can add more breakpoint sizes for your shortcodes here. The current values being assigned here are our default values, which the shortcode will ovveride
        'size1' => 0,
        'size2' => 600,
        'size3' => 1000,
      ), $atts));
    
      // Here we're defining our mappings to be stored as variables, so we can declare whatever size we want in our shortecode 
      $mappings = array(
        $size1 => 'small-img',
        $size2 => 'medium-img',
        $size3 => 'large-img'
      );
    
      // Then we pass in the responsive image function, and print out the new responsive image tag with our shortcode variables included
      return 
        '<span data-picture>'
          . getPictureSrcs($imageid, $mappings) .
          // this noscript tag contains our default image for old / JavaScript-less browsers, and we're using size2 as our default
          '<noscript>' . wp_get_attachment_image($imageid, $size2) . '</noscript>
        </span>';
    }
    add_shortcode('responsive', 'responsiveShortcode');

Ideally you define your breakpoints in the plugin here and then don't pass them at all in the shortcode, like:

[responsive imageid="12"]

Then only use the shortcode attributes in the rare cases you need to override the breakpoints.

Altering the Media Uploader output

This shortcode will be tremendously useful (remember we can even adjust the markup to be the correct <picture> in the future programmatically). But, how do we know the image ID to use? The Media Uploader UI doesn't make that information available. It knows that ID though, and with a simple filter we can adjust what gets sent to the editor:

function responsive_insert_image($html, $id, $caption, $title, $align, $url) {
      return "[responsive imageid='$id' size1='0' size2='600' size3='1000']";
    }
    add_filter('image_send_to_editor', 'responsive_insert_image', 10, 9);

Now selecting and inserting an image from the editor will work like this:

That'll do it! Here you can see it working:

More you can do

• If you're looking for a wider range of support, consider installing Matchmedia.js as well. It will make @media queries start working in older browsers, which then automatically makes Picturefill work as well.
• Rather than use shortcodes or adjust the media uploader output, you could make this work with a special image field via Advanced Custom Fields.
• You could adjust the markup to allow for align-* as WordPress likes to do. Or with <figure> and <figcaption> elements. Also, alt tags.
• You could have the settings for the breakpoints be settable via UI that the the plugin creates, rather than hard coded into the plugin.

Here's the GitHub repo if you want to contribute.

Hassle Free Responsive Images for WordPress is a post from CSS-Tricks

This is worth linking up directly from here, as it's this very site the hacker was targeting. And then later, me.

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ShopTalk Special: One on One With a Hacker is a post from CSS-Tricks