New West Technologies today announced the release of their all new Bitcoin integration for Microsoft Dynamics Retail Management Systems or RMS.

American jazz singer and songwriter Billie Holiday has a Baltimore connection. She spent the bulk of her childhood on a block of South Durham Street in Upper Fells Point. Residents and artists in that neighborhood are honoring her by starting a project that pays tribute to Holiday while also bringing new life to the block.

Media and communication studies student Ken Corbett is an intern for WYPR’s Maryland Morning and produced and narrated a story about the project that aired on the program January 17. In December, Corbett spent a day on Holiday’s block on South Durham Street and put together a story after interviewing residents and Holiday’s biographer.

“Billie Holiday may have spent some of her darker years in Baltimore, but the people who live in her old neighborhood now are using that legacy and her image to brighten things up,” Corbett says.

You can listen to the full story here.

Today we’re going to be looking at the perfect inline SVG workflow for WordPress. Before we go any further though, if you’re unfamiliar with the different varieties of SVGs, I highly recommend you take a quick read through Chris Coyier’s fantastic CSS-Tricks article on the subject.

Setting the Scene

Recently, I was working on a client project when I discovered the need to change the color of the logo based the state of the site header. Of course, I could just create two separate SVGs, each with a different fill color and simply change out the background image of my a.logo tag depending upon the state of the header, but that’s not necessary. With SVGs, all I have to do is embed the logo as an inline SVG and simply make the color change with the CSS fill property.

The only real problem with inline SVGs in my book is their sheer size. The particular logo I was working with was fairly complex as far as logos go and copying the SVG code right into my template would be pretty messy and take up a lot screen space. In his article, Chris makes mention of using the PHP include() function to embed SVGs, but if you’re working in WordPress there’s a better way to do it.

Enter get_template_part()

Instead, what we can use is WordPress’s native get_template_part() function. According to the WordPress codex, the purpose of get_template_part() is to:

Load a template part into a template (other than header, sidebar, footer) making it easy for a theme to reuse sections of code and an easy way for child themes to replace sections of their parent theme.

That’s nice and all, but we’re going to use it for something a bit different today. And they thought they could control us…

First, let’s drop the desired SVG into an images folder just inside the root of our theme. Now, rename the SVG to inline-[filename].svg.php. So, if its original name was logo.svg, name it inline-logo.svg.php.

Now it’s time for some get_template_part() action. get_template_part() accepts two parameters, the slug, and the name. Simply put, the slug is everything before the first hyphen (-) in the filename and the name is everything after.

So, to include our SVG, we’ll simply call get_template_part() and fill out the parameters like so:

get_template_part(‘images/inline’, ‘logo.svg’);
    

See how easy that was? Now, we’ve got clean code in our template file, an inline SVG embedded right into our page that can be styled with CSS, all with zero HTTP requests!

This is a method I’ve been relying recently and I’ve found to work really well, but I’d love to hear any and all suggestions. Fire off in the comments!

The post The Perfect WordPress Inline SVG Workflow appeared first on Treehouse Blog.

There has been growing speculation in recent weeks that Rep. John Delaney (D-MD) has plans on entering the Maryland race for governor. Delaney is a first-time lawmaker and a former banking executive.

Donald Norris, public policy professor and chair, was interviewed for an article published January 22 in The Baltimore Sun about the possibility of Delaney entering the race. He commented that Delaney is likely attempting to boost his recognition for a statewide race some time in the future.

“Because it’s this late, it would suggest to me that he won’t do it,” Norris said. “Were he to do it — and throw his considerable wealth into it — I think that automatically makes him a formidable candidate.”

There are already three Democrats in the governor’s race: Lt. Gov. Anthony Brown, Attorney General Douglas Gansler and Del. Heather Mizeur.

You can read the full article in The Baltimore Sun here.

A roundup of the most interesting stories from other sites, collected by the staff at MIT Technology Review.

Eagle Scout. Idealist. Drug Trafficker?
An incisive profile of the suspect and the ideology behind Silk Road, the defunct online drug bazaar.
—Brian Bergstein, deputy editor