Tom McFarlin

Software, Development, and WordPress

An Introduction to DevKinsta

January 18, 2021 /

TL;DR: For how much this post may sound like a paid or promoted review, it’s not. The short of it is that I’ve been hosting this site on Kinsta for a few years now and I’ve been happy, and continually impressed at their offering so when they announced their DevKinsta application, I was just as interested to try it out as I have been with Local, Valet, MAMP, and others.

In short, DevKinsta bills itself as a way to:

Design, develop, and deploy WordPress sites from the comfort of your local machine. DevKinsta is free forever, and available for macOS and Windows.

Kinsta

But rather than walk through whatever videos and other collateral the site has to offer, I thought I’d go through the process of setting it up from download to site setup, from creating a site, to loading it in a browser, and taking a look at how everything is set up within the file structure.

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January 12, 2021 /

I made a goal for myself in January 2020 to stop using Google products by the end of the year. That might sound like way too generous a timeline, but Google owned pretty much all of my data at that point, so it was a fairly large project. Plus I’m a slow and steady kind of person. I know if I give myself a generous enough timeline I can accomplish even things that seem too hard for me at first.

via Kira McLean

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays (From 2020 to 2021)

December 25, 2020 /

If you’ve read my blog for at least a year, then you know that I usually take the time between Christmas and New Year’s to stay offline and visit with family and friends.

Obviously, this year is a little different for everyone but we’re fortunate enough to be surrounded with many who are near-and-dear.

Though I don’t do long retrospective posts, I do like to recap some of the things that have happened through the course of the year both offline and online.

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Privacy on the Web, 2020

December 11, 2020 /

Back in 2019, I started writing a series of posts around the idea of how to maintain privacy on the web (because it was a growing concern at least for me). As I wrote then:

For many of us, we’re well aware of the privacy implications of the software and services many of us use on a day-to-day basis even if we’re not sure just how this information is shared.

14 March 2019

Things haven’t slowed down with regard to privacy and though I’m still consistently on the lookout for different services, utilities, applications, and so on, I thought it might be useful to round up everything that I’ve drafted thus far.

So here’s a rundown of material I’ve covered in both 2019 and 2020.

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How I Backup Photos and Videos Every Month

December 2, 2020 /

One of the things that I’ve done since high school (at least that’s when I think I started) is consistently backup photos and videos.

Back then, I wasn’t taking as many photos – I was younger, digital cameras still saved things to flash cards, and the EXIF data would be inaccurate if the battery ever completely died.

Then, I had to reset it or just roll with inaccurate timestamps. And as a teenager, who cares when something was taken?

Unfortunately, I lost all digital media prior to 2003. That’s a story for another time, but it was the catalyst for regularly backing up my photos and videos in several formats and in several locations.

And though the process by which I do this has changed over the years, I still take the time to do it so much so that I now have 17 years worth of photos and videos organized my year, month, day, hour, minute, and second.

And all are taken from various digital cameras through every iteration of a cell phone I’ve owned.

Sure, our mobile operating systems do a good job of backing up and sorting things for us but I still like to have multiple backups of everything so at the end of each month, I still export everything from my phone and go through a process of backing everything up.

Though I’m always interested in how other people do it, I’ve also had some friends and colleagues ask what my process is. So that’s the purpose of this post.

More specifically: Here’s how I backup photos, videos, and organize them each month.

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