About

Hey, I’m Tom

I’m a self-employed developer who primarily works with WordPress and JavaScript to build software for others. I’m also a partner at 8BIT, and the technical co-founder of Action and Influence.

About This Blog

This is my personal blog where I share articles, notes, tips, and resources related to WordPress development. I also discuss my projects both personal and commissioned.

I aim to post at least three times a week, each time in a different category, but I often post more frequently than that.

Some of my more popular posts include:

I also frequently share functions, code snippets, and general tips on how to achieve certain things in WordPress such as:

I share various WordPress plugins that I’ve developed and maintain as well as notes on how I’ve built them. A few examples include:

Occasionally, I speak at various meetups about WordPress both as a blogger and as a developer.

If you’re a developer, designer, or a blogger who is passionate about WordPress, I invite you to subscribe!

A Bit Of History

Tom McFarlin

I graduated from the Georgia Institute of Technology with a degree in Computer Science focused in Software Engineering.

Shortly thereafter, I worked for CareerBuilder.com as a software engineer and as a team lead primarily working with .NET.

In 2010, I moved to self-employment where I wanted to focus on building software and sites for small businesses, teams, and individuals. Since then, I’ve built products for others using PHP, Ruby on Rails, JavaScript (both vanilla and using jQuery), and WordPress.

I’ve been a Microsoft MVP since 2011.

When it comes to engineering, I believe in going deep rather than wide and have since begun to narrowly focus my professional development efforts.

I believe that WordPress is the best blogging platform on the planet, and I also believe that it can serve as a tremendous foundation for building applications. Through blogging, projects, and speaking, I aim to help other bloggers and developers get involved with the WordPress community.

Projects and Commissions

I maintain a number of different projects. As evidenced throughout this page, I’m primarily spending my time working with jQuery and WordPress.

Here’s where you can find my work:

  • All of my open source projects including example code for certain blog posts are available on GitHub

WordPress

  • Comment Tweets allows authors to include tweets relevant to the given post in the comment stream of their blog.
  • Comment Images is a plugin that allows readers to upload images along with their comments.
  • Category Sticky Post allows you to mark a post as sticky within a specific category archive. It works exactly like the typical sticky post functionality within WordPress, except that it’s specifically for category archive.
  • Tag Sticky Post allows you to mark a post as sticky within a specific tag archive. It works exactly like the typical sticky post functionality within WordPress, except that it’s specifically for tag archives.
  • Tipsy Social Icons makes it easy to include a variety of social icons and custom labels into your WordPress blog or site.
  • WordPress Plugin Boilerplate is an organized, maintainable boilerplate for building plugins using WordPress best practices.
  • WordPress Widget Boilerplate is an organized, maintainable boilerplate for building widgets using WordPress best practices.

jQuery

  • Collapsible Menus makes it easy to create a collapsible menu using nested, unordered lists.
  • Simple Overlay is a lightweight plugin that makes adding overlays trivially easy.

For Hire

I’m available for hire and enjoy partnering with others for fun and interesting projects. If you’re interested in hiring me, please contact me.

8BIT

I’m a partner and lead developer at 8BIT where we’re passionate about digital publishing. With our flagship product, Standard, we’re working to make the best premium theme for digital publishers.

There are currently two versions of the theme available:

  • Standard For WordPress.com, with which we had the honor of being Automattic’s fifth partner in the premium theme marketplace.
  • Standard 3.0, which is specifically built for self-hosted WordPress installations.

We also released our first analog product in the third quarter of 2012 that aims to close the gap between capturing ideas for blog inspiration and sitting at a computer.

Action & Influence, Inc.

I’m the technical co-founder of Action & Influence where we seek to optimize your people, teams, and how they work together. I’m responsible for building the technology applications that power the company.

For more information about the Action & Influence process, visit our website.

Writing and Speaking

Blogging

Aside from my personal blog, I also aim to contribute to the WordPress community by providing various tutorials and articles on other blogs.

If you’re interested in having me contribute to your blog, feel free to contact me.

Speaking

I’ve recently begun speaking at a variety of events in the Atlanta area covering all things WordPress.

I’ve given talks on the following topics:

Be sure to check out my speaking page for more information. If you’re interested in having me speak at your event be it for bloggers or developers, please contact me.

Contact Me

I try to respond to every comment, but I also enjoy hearing from others via email. Feel free to contact me using my contact page, or shoot me a tweet at any time.