Author: Tom (Page 2 of 426)

Review and Highlights of 2024

December 30, 2024 / Tom

I usually don’t write a full “year in review” type of post, but I do sometimes highlight various milestones, goals, and/or notable things that have happened in the last year. And this year, I’ve both the desire and time to write about exactly that.

When drafting the last post, I re-read some of the posts I’d published in the past. While it’s fun to see how things evolve over the years, it also provides a guide for how to write these kinds of posts even when I feel out of the habit.

So here’s a summary of the highlights from this year.

Highlights of 2024

Most Popular Posts

How To Configure Laravel Herd, Xdebug, and Visual Studio Code. Herd makes debugging with PHPStorm easy; however, if you’re to get started with Laravel Herd, Xdebug, and Visual Studio Code then there’s a little more configuration to do. This post shows you how to do it. You may also be interested in how to catch outgoing emails from Laravel Herd, too.
How to Successfully Deregister Anonymous Functions in WordPress. A short introduction to a number of technical ideas both in PHP and WordPress to explain why deregistering anonymous functions is nearly impossible. This post provides a way – and a plugin – for us to actually get contextual information about every single hook and callback in an instance of WordPress.
Use Static Variables in Plugin Bootstrap Files. If your plugin’s bootstrap registers a callback with a WordPress hook, considering using static variables to prevent code from being called unnecessarily more than once.
Catch Outgoing Emails From WordPress in Laravel Herd. If you’re using WordPress and you’re looking for an extremely quick way to add this functionality to your local installation, add the included code to an mu-plugin.
Maybe ChatGPT Didn’t Wreck Our Type of Content. This is a follow-up post to an article I wrote in 2023 about how ChatGPT did wreck our type of content.

Books

For the past couple of years, I’ve been trying to read two books simultaneously – one fiction and one non-fiction. I don’t participate in book clubs, I don’t try to accomplish a certain number of books per month (or year or whatever other unit of time), and I don’t always try to grab whatever the most recent best seller is.

Instead, I try to read the things that I want and that seem relevant, interesting, and/or helpful. I read a total of 20 books this year (10 fiction, 10 non-fiction).

Here are the things I enjoyed the most:

Non-fiction
- Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout by Cal Newport.
- Effortless by Greg McKeown.
Fiction
- The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemmingway.
- The Dark Tower (Books 1 – 4) by Stephen King. I’m currently in Book 5 at the time of this writing and am looking to finish this epic story in the first quarter of 2025.

Omission from this list doesn’t mean that I didn’t like it or that it wasn’t something educational. I tried to limit this list to one book from each category but I couldn’t do it so I arbitrarily decided to include two from each instead.

Fitness

Over the years, I’ve tried to make exercise a consistent part of my day-to-day. On the whole, I’ve been good about it even though the type of fitness I do each year tends to change.

Some years, I’ve done nothing but run. Other years, I’ve incorporated some type of guided program. And there are other times where I’ve mixed it up between the two.

This year was kind of like the latter: I was running at least two-to-three 5Ks a week and lifting weights every other day. Unfortunately, I pinched a nerve in my back in September and that brought everything to a grinding halt.

I started walking every day once again in November but that’s about the extent of what I’m doing. My goal is to get back to both cardio and basic weight lifting in January, but we’ll see.

Lastly, if you workout and have an Apple Watch or an iPhone, I recommend Gentler Streak. It’s far an away my favorite fitness app primarily because it aims to keep you moving and in a healthy state without having you just blindly try to close your rings.

Music, TV, and Podcasts

My favorite music from 2024 include the following albums:

Moment of Truth by the Red Clay Strays (and their Live At The Ryman album is absolutely worth it, too). If there was a way to capture 50s rock and roll with 70s southern rock and timeless blues lyrics, this is the band.
Deeper Well by Kacey Musgraves. I’ve been a fan of hers for a longtime. Golden Hour is still my favorite by her and I haven’t really been a fan of anything sense, but Deeper Well is a bit of a return to form.
Rebel Diamonds by The Killers. This is more of a greatest hits collection but if you’ve never listened to the band or are looking to hear how their sound has changed over the year, it’s a good listen.
I started listening to Wild Rivers this year and am a fan of what I’ve heard so far. I can’t recommend any single album since most of their songs came up in a recommended playlist.

Most of the shows I watch during the year are whenever I’m on the treadmill or it’s the period between when the kids are done for the day and Meghan and I are still up.

Only Murders in the Building. I thoroughly enjoy Steve Martin and Martin Short’s comedy in this show (and Selena Gomez holds her own with them while also balancing them out). We’ve not watched the most recent season yet, but very much enjoy this show so far.
From. It’s hard to succinctly describe this show. If you’re into sci-fi horror, then read up on the premise on Wikipedia. It’s shame how much time passes between seasons, but that seems to be the norm in the age of streaming. I wish this show was available on a platform with a wider reach
Shrinking. I didn’t start watching this until October but am glad I did so much so that I watched it once through on my own then and immediately watched it through again with Meghan. If you’re a fan of Scrubs, you’ll likely love this show.

I was going to do a Music, Movies, and TV section but I can count the number of movies I watched this year on one hand so I’m mixing it up and adding the podcasts I enjoyed the most this year.

Deep Questions with Cal Newport
Office Ladies. I listened to every episode of this podcast from when it started (back before 2020 even brought more people to the show). It was really good especially given that the first time through The Office was when I was in college.
The Iced Coffee Hour
Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend especially any episode with Jordan Schlansky.

This is not an exhaustive list nor is my sharing this saying I’ve listened to every single episode (unless I mention it, obviously). But they are the ones that kept me coming back a few times a month.

To 2025

Since the majority of what I write here on a ~~daily~~, ~~weekly~~, monthly basis primarily has to do with my day-to-day, I try to cover anything outside of that in posts like this.

And these are the highlights for 2024. Like most, I have things that I’m planning to do in 2025 though I’ll wait until this time next year to share how everything went.

If anything the last couple of years has shown me, it’s that this stage of life – while great – has all kinds of ways for making it difficult to make concrete plans. So beyond the high-level goals of reading, working out, listening to music, and writing, there’s not much more to add.

Whatever it is you’ve planned for 2025, here’s to it all going well. And if not, here’s to having the fortitude to push through.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays 2024

December 25, 2024 / Tom

Over the years, I’ve usually written some type of end of the year post centered around Christmas that also talks about what’s happening and what happened:

And the closest I came to doing something like this last year was an article about The Most Useful (Or Popular) Articles from 2023.

For the first set, it’s fun to look back at how things have changed, and for the latter, it’s neat to look back to see what caught attention over the last year.

These posts are the closest I get to the ‘end of the year’ type of posts and I’d like to eventually get one done for 2024 even if I don’t complete it before the start of the year.

For today, though, it’s a short post to say Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays.

Merry Christmas 2024

Whether or not you’re celebrating Christmas, Hanukkah, Boxing Day, something else, or nothing at all, may the week (or weekend) be good to you.

As for my family and me, we’re celebrating Christmas and spending time with extended family over the next few days.

It’s my favorite time of year and, as cliché, as it may sound, I dig spending it with those who are near-and-dear. And I think everyone should be so lucky.

With that, here’s to the end of the year and the beginning of the next.

WP Privacy, Attestation, Git Updater Lite, and More

December 6, 2024 / Tom

For years, I’ve kept track of various resources that I’ve found useful. Having them here makes it easy to refer to them in the future should the need arise (don’t you refer back to your old posts? /s).

It also makes it easy for others to find them if they’re searching for them either in traditional ways or via some of the new ways we have to search (that latter of which is why I find value in still sharing content).

Anyway, over the last two weeks, there have a been four things I’ve found that I hope to look more into in the future. And if not, at least they’re here for posterity.

WP API Privacy. The default WordPress installation from wordpress.org automatically transmits extraneous information via various HTTP calls that occur in the admin. Some of this data may be cause for concern from a privacy perspective. This plugin seeks to limit that information, attempting to further protect your privacy in the process (via Duane Storey).
WordPress Plugin Attestation. Add this action to your deployment workflow to generate a build provenance attestation of the plugin ZIP file on WordPress.org (via John Blackbourne). For what it’s worth, “attestation” is just the verification that the software comes from where it claims to originate.
RAVE for WordPress. RAVE for WordPress is an automated tool which compares the contents of published packages of WordPress with the canonical source code to verify they have not been tampered with (via John Blackbourne).
Git Updater Lite. “Since Git Updater already gathers and parses this data, Git Updater Lite only needs to query an update server run by the developer” (via Andy Fragen).

And if you stumble across this post and are interested in anything I’ve written in the past week, you can find that below:

If you’re using WordPress and you’re looking for an extremely quick way to add this functionality to your local installation, add the following code to an mu-plugin …

Catch Outgoing Emails From WordPress in Laravel Herd

Until the next time there’s a backlog of stuff for me to share, that’s it for now.

Catch Outgoing Emails From WordPress in Laravel Herd

December 5, 2024 / Tom

Earlier this year, I swapped my local development environment over to Herd (along with a couple of other changes such as DBngin which is worth covering in another post).

There’s a lot to like about it one of which is how easy it is to begin capturing outgoing emails from whatever application you’re using.

From the docs:

Herd Pro provides an SMTP mail server on your local machine that catches all outgoing emails instead of sending them to the world. It displays them in Herds own email client and provides rich debugging capabilities for all types of emails.

Emails From WordPress in Laravel Herd

If you’re using WordPress and you’re looking for an extremely quick way to add this functionality to your local installation, add the following code to an mu-plugin:

<?php
/**
 * Initializes the PHPMailer instance before it is used to send an email.
 *
 * This action hook is used to configure the PHPMailer instance with the necessary
 * SMTP settings, such as the host, authentication, port, username, and password.
 *
 * @param PHPMailer $phpmailer The PHPMailer instance being initialized.
 */
add_action('phpmailer_init', function ($phpmailer) {
    $phpmailer->isSMTP();
    $phpmailer->Host = '127.0.0.1';
    $phpmailer->SMTPAuth = true;
    $phpmailer->Port = 2525;
    $phpmailer->Username = 'WordPress';
    $phpmailer->Password = '';
});

For example, I have a file – herd-mail.php – located in mu-plugins. Once this is added, any outgoing email from WordPress will be immediately captured and funneled to Herd’s email inbox for review.

Notes

PHPMailer is part of WordPress core so there’s no need to install a third-party library).
phpmailer_init is a native WordPress hook.
It’s also really easy to set up Xdebug in Visual Studio Code to work with Herd. If you’re interested in learning how, review this article.

Thanksgiving 2024

November 28, 2024 / Tom

At this point, it’s more of a tradition to post on Thanksgiving Day than anything else. I’ve been doing it for 12 years now.

But the general sentiment is still the same as it was 10 years ago:

We’re celebrating Thanksgiving today in the United States, so I’m taking a day off of the typical routine.

If you’re in the United States and/or are celebrating today, may it be a good one. And if not, may your day still be just as great.

I’m looking forward to ending the year strong and with a few more posts as I try to get back in the habit.