Author: Tom (Page 198 of 430)

Programming Frustration (And Elation)

October 5, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

It’s one of those nights where I’m sitting at my desk after spending the majority of the day at the computer. This used to be the norm when I was younger, but now I try to keep my hours at my desk a bit more limited for a variety of reasons.

Sometimes, as we all know, work ends up keeping us up a little bit later and in places a little bit longer than we’ve anticipated.

Late Night Laptop

In this instance, I’m working to track down a bug I’ve been after for a better half of the day and it’s something I need to get done now because later will be too late.

There’s other work to do and this is something that needs to be shipped, anyway.

If you’re someone who writes any type of code for a living, then you know the feeling of programming frustration I’m talking about: It starts off at a level of looking forward to getting back into the code with a level of confidence thinking:

“Okay, I’ve had time to step away from it. I should be able to come at this with a fresh perspective.”

Because sometimes that’s exactly what happens isn’t it?

Why I Recommend SearchWP

October 2, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

For a few years now, I’ve been using SearchWP on this and on a few other sites I’ve either built or had a hand in improving.

SearchWP

Most people who are active in the WordPress development space are aware of this plugin (at least, I think they are), but if you’re someone who’s not involved with WordPress at that level and are looking for a way to improve the search functionality of your site, then I can’t recommend the plugin enough.

Then again, even if you are a developer and you’ve never used it, the same sentiment rings true.

Mixing Functions and Constructs in PHP Scripts

October 1, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

One of the features people tend to love or hate (or simply accept) about writing PHP scripts is how you can mix general constructs of the language – such as conditions – with functions outside of any type of class, namespace, or container.

Bringing a Little Order to the Chaos

That is, you can write conditional logic that exists within the global namespace right alongside functions that aren’t part of anything other than the global namespace, as well. This can make for difficult code to maintain.

But the point of this post isn’t to complain – for what it’s worth, I see it as the nature of the language, accept it for what it is, try to avoid it, and work with it whenever something comes across my desk. I’m far less dogmatic about that kind of stuff than I used to be when I first started working as a developer, but I digress.

Anyway, this post is tagged as “WordPress” which doesn’t make a lot of sense, however the purpose of doing so is because I was recently working on an older WordPress-based site that was using Ajax, it wasn’t doing so using the built-in API, and it was basically using Ajax to call a vanilla PHP script.

As such, I thought I’d write a bit about as how it’s still possible to refactor code like this so it’s a little more maintainable even if it’s using a style of coding with which we don’t necessarily like to use.

Why I Still Use Path

September 30, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

About two years ago, I wrote about My Day-To-Day: Path and why I was a fan of the social network. Two years ago – which is roughly a decade in Internet years, right? – and a lot has happened since then.

Path

In fact, I stopped using the social network for a while, opted to start using it again, and continue to do so now. Occasionally, I’ll share content from Path to Twitter.

I did so a couple of weeks ago and received the following tweet:

@tommcfarlin Wow you still use Path. I thought that app was dead!

— Patrick Quirke (@pquirke) September 9, 2015

A completely valid opinion and one I’m finding more and more people are asking me about when they find out that I (and a few family members and friends) still use.

So I thought I’d write an updated post about Path and why I’m still a fan of the app.

When Things Go South (With a Company, Clients, and More)

September 29, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

Occasionally, I’m asked how I handle the situation when things go south with company, clients, people with whom I’m working, and so on. This is one of those things that if you were to ask a handful of different people ranging from freelancers to C-level executives, you’d probably get different answers from each of them.

And rightly so.

After all, we’re all working for and/or with people at different places in the industry, so how we handle this situation is going to be unique to our particular position. So this isn’t one of those types of questions that has a universal answer.

I can only answer it with respect to the type of business I’ve done over the past few years. If you’re a single person or a small team, then maybe this will be helpful.