Author: Tom (Page 20 of 426)

Keep a Journal of What It Takes to Get It Working

April 8, 2022 / Tom

This is not new information and this is not a new idea that you’re about to read. This isn’t a novel idea. This isn’t something that no one has ever discussed. This is the furthest thing from a new idea.

Instead, this is me re-iterating something that people in our field talk about over and over and over. It bears repeating though because it still comes up again. And with good reason: It’s a good reminder that we should be doing this.

We should be keeping a journal of the work we do. Really.

I don’t mean a blog, as much as I think they’re important, and I don’t mean Twitter threads, I don’t mean comments on Hacker News, and I don’t mean Stack Overflow questions or answers.

I mean text files or markdown files or HTML files or whatever it is you want to use. Here’s why: The longer you work in software, specifically on the web, the more likely you’re going to encounter all sorts of other software required just to get The Thing™️ working. And the less likely your exact situation is identical to someone else’s.

Sure they – or you – can say “Have you tried [doing this]?” or they can recommend “Upgrade [this particular package]?” or “Bypass [this particular dependency] because it’s likely not needed.”

That still leaves a lot of unknowns. They are suggestions.

Writing for WordPress Has to Change (For Me)

April 4, 2022 / Tom

When I first started writing on this blog, It was on October 3, 2010. That’s wild to think about. I know that those who read usually fall into one of three categories:

People who read regularly, for which I thank you,
People who are aware of it and check periodically, for which I thank you,
And people who are drivebys from searches from various search engines.

All of that is great and fine and I don’t think I ever would’ve thought I’d be writing roughly 12 years later.

But here we are.

Using Pipe Viewer for Large Migrations

March 15, 2022 / Tom

In WordPress, most migrations can be easily done by:

Using a web-based utility such as Migrate DB Pro or PhpMyAdmin,
Using a database front-end application like TablePlus,
Or even using the mysql command-line for importing an SQL dump.

None of these are bad options but each present their own set of challenges especially with large migrations:

web-based applications can timeout,
front-end applications may lack some functionality for getting insight into what’s going on (or not giving clear information on what something such as a lock is during its process list),
and terminal applications like mysql can do the job but give very little insight on to where to status of the import stands.

If you’re working with a relatively small dataset, then any of the above options would be fine (and I’m usually partial to TablePlus 🙂) or the command-line but when importing a database that was roughly 30GB in size, I needed something else to help.

A web application would time out,
A front-end application lacked feedback on time or progress,
A terminal application was just waiting for the process to finish with no insight as to what’s going on.

And this is where pv comes into play.

A Beginner’s Guide to Querying the Slack API

March 10, 2022 / Tom

Creating Slack applications can be as time-consuming and complex as writing any other type of application. What if you’re interested in querying the Slack API for your workspace and incorporating the results in a WordPress plugin? Here’s how you can get started.

Ultimately, all we need to make queries to the Web API is an OAuth token and a REST API client to make requests. From there, it’s a matter of programmatically implementing the functionality in your code.

But that’s not at what we’re aiming. Instead, this article is more about learning how to make requests to the Slack API and what’s required to get set up to do so.

Using Ray in WordPress Development: An Example of Classic Debugging

March 4, 2022 / Tom

TL;DR: This final article will demonstrate how to use Ray in WordPress as an example of classic debugging.

No, it’s not the same as something such as Xdebug, but it demonstrates what we can do such as changing variables on the fly and changing the course of execution.

⚠️ If you’ve not already set up your environment, please read this post and make sure you have the free version of Ray installed.