Author: Tom (Page 112 of 427)

How To Make MySQL Globally Accessible (From MAMP)

May 9, 2017 / Tom

I recently walked through how to make WP-CLI globally accessible across your system (assuming you’re running macOS or a variation of Linux).

I’ve also talked about various things as it relates to using MAMP Pro for WordPress development. Naturally, one of those tools is also MySQL; however, it’s one that is often treated as a “set it and forget it” application.

But I’ve recently started working on a project that requires a bit of automation as it relates to syncing the development and the staging databases. And since this is scripted, it assumes that MySQL is globally available.

If the only way you’ve installed MySQL is via MAMP (or perhaps another similar package), then you’ll likely need to make MySQL globally accessible on your system.

Here’s how to do that.

Mindset For Debugging (And Why We Need It)

May 8, 2017 / Tom

When it comes to writing software, maintaining software, or simply trying to understand software, a debugger is one of the most powerful tools that we can use.

But when it comes to WordPress, it seems that it’s less common. Personally, I’m not sure why:

I don’t know if it has to do with the nature of open-source,
if has to do with the convenience of echo and var_dump that are built into the language,
or if I’m just missing other developers who talk about it.

Regardless, if an IDE doesn’t have a built-in debugger, it’s not too difficult to set up Xdebug and get started using it. And once you do start using it, you learn much more about how a given piece of software performs regardless of if you wrote it or if someone else wrote it.

Yes, I’ve written on this topic before, but I recently stumbled across an article that I found to be a really good break down of how to shift one’s thinking into a mindset for debugging.

Hitting Pause on Publish

May 1, 2017 / Tom

Whenever there are holidays, I still publish a post about what’s going on simply because this blog has become a little more than just a place to talk about code. It’s also a place where I very occasionally share what is happening offline.

This week, my wife and I are finally taking a week-long trip with our daughters.

And we’re stoked.

How I Built It Podcast: Page Template Dashboard

April 28, 2017 / Tom

For those of you who aren’t familiar, the How I Built It podcast is a show that Joe Casabona publishes each week. In short, the show features Joe chatting with various people who are building things using WordPress, how they went about it, and other tangential topics.

I think it’s a neat idea for the show.

Coincidentally, I had a chance to finally meet Joe in person last year after (at the Post Status Publish conference) years of conversing online. If you’ve heard him on the podcast, he’s just as friendly in person. And if you’re not following him on Twitter, I recommend it.

That said, I had the chance to be featured on a recent episode of How I Built It in which I talk about one of my plugins (that’s horribly named) and some other related topics.

Social Media Strategy: For Real? (No, But I’ve Tools)

April 27, 2017 / Tom

Late last year, I started a new site in which I was aiming to talk about productivity, time management, and the like. The original announcement post covers much more than I’ll bother sharing here.

Several things have come from this blog, though. For example, I get tweets, emails, and other forms of [sometimes creepy but maybe just kidding] messages about how I run my business, how I manage my time, what applications, sites, services, and so on that I recommend.

Ultimately, the site didn’t perform as well by both by internal metrics and by what I’d hoped, but I’m still receiving some questions about how I manage certain things.

And given that this blog is still geared towards A Perspective on WordPress Development (which may change a little in the near future), I thought why not fold up some of those topics on productivity into this blog?

For some readers, it’s not going to be the content you’re used to seeing but for others I hope it answers some of the questions I occasionally receive.

That’s a bit of a longer introduction, sure, but it gives you a heads up on if you want to keep reading or not, right?

When it comes to social media, people have some social media strategy that they try to follow, implement, or whatever to garner followers (which can be lame in my opinion but I do get it from a marketer’s perspective).

I’m not writing about any social media strategy. I’ll share the tools I wire up to make sure I’m tracking what I’m interested in and sharing what I want to share.

So here’s my social media strategy, if you even want to call it that, and the tools I use.