Author: Tom (Page 197 of 430)

Tips For Daily Blogging (And How To Garner Blog Post Ideas)

October 12, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

Like anyone who blogs are regular intervals, be it a few times a week to daily, I’m asked how I write daily. In short, I wish I had a simple recipe to explain how to do it.

But I think this is something unique to every person.

Sure, I think people should write daily even if they aren’t publishing their content on a blog. I believe something happens when you articulate your thoughts via the written word.

You become better at thinking through some of your own opinions.
You get better at presenting ideas to other people even if they will result in a debate.
You reason through your own convictions for why you feel the way you do about a given topic.

Sure, this sounds a little silly when talking about writing about development. It’s not, though.

Our field is one that’s built on the idea of logic and having things work in a logical and efficient manner. It’s important to make sure that our reasons for why we do the things we do have been reasons through, as well.

But I’ll talk more on that in a moment.

Instead, back to the original question: How does one get into the habit of daily blogging?

Using Third-Party Code Is Not Immature

October 9, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

One aspect of growing in a career in development is knowing when to write your own code and when to use the work of others.

So many libraries available via others work.

This isn’t a hard and fast rule, but when we start out it’s like we want to roll everything on our own. I don’t know if it’s because we want to prove to our employer, our clients, or ourselves we can do it. Maybe it’s a mix of the two or maybe we just welcome the challenge.

Maybe it’s all the above.

Whatever the case, we’ll eventually work on larger projects and eventually become more specialized. That is, we’ll identify what we need to write and where we can use an existing library.

Quick Tip: An Alternative To file_get_contents

October 8, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

One of the more common PHP functions developers use in order to make remote requests is file_get_contents. The function makes it easy to send requests to another URL and then handle the response.

It’s especially handy if you need to make an Ajax request to another site but aren’t allowed to do so from the client-side because of cross-site-scripting.

That said, cURL is often a better option than file_get_contents because it gives you far more control over the options that are set when setting up the request to be made. file_get_contents simply doesn’t do that. Instead, it provides enough options for making simple GET requests.

No, not that kind of curl.

For these reasons, it’s often a good idea to use cURL when you need to provide a more fine-tuned request. Even more so, it’s helpful to have all of the functionality wrapped up in a utility function you can drop in your project whenever you need it.

The Grid Ruler Chrome Extension

October 7, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

If you work in web development long enough, odds are you’re going to discover your strength lies within writing code or designing a site. It’s possible to be good at both – I’ve seen it in rare cases – but it’s more common for someone to be strong in one area or the other.

As easy as frameworks like Bootstrap, Foundation, 960gs, and so on have made it for us to build layouts against a grid, it has not – thankfully – removed the need for designers (of course, that was never their intent, anyway).

The reason I bring this up is because years ago, a good friend of a mine – a designer, to be clear – would jokingly say I was pixel approximate.

And he wasn’t wrong.

When Offering Programming Advice

October 6, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

A few weeks ago, I shared a post in which I walked readers through how to achieve something within the context of WordPress. It essence, it was programming advice.

Programming Advice

The post was received okay, though it wasn’t without its [valid] set of criticism (which I’ll address later). Luckily, most of the people who responded did so via comments and emails explaining why they took issue with part of the code, and how they would go about addressing it were they having to solve a similar problem.

Not everyone was like that (and they never are). Instead, if you share any code of any type in any fashion with anyone you’re likely to get some type of response reading something like

It’s okay, but it’s not how I would do it.

The problem with statements like this – especially for those who want to get better at what they’re doing – is it implies there’s a better way, but the way isn’t offered up as a solution.

Bummer.