Author: Tom (Page 245 of 433)

My Suite of Apps: Better Rename 9

November 28, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

I received my first digital camera in the early 2000’s as a birthday present (though I had used my parents’ Sony Mavica and a few floppy disks for years prior) and I’ve done what I can to save every picture and video taken with that camera and every digital camera I’ve had – including phones – ever since.

I’m not a photographer by any means – not even a hobbyist – but I, like anyone else, takes pictures during any kind of event that’s going on. And since becoming a dad, I’m taking pictures nearly every day since, you know, kids do something new all the time ;).

Anyway, this means that I have a little over 10 years worth of pictures and videos archived. I’m compulsive about their organization (and I’m also a little paranoid about losing them which has lead to a multisite backup strategy, but that’s for another post).

That is, I organize all of the photos by year, month, day, hour, minute, and second – or I try to do so up to whatever the greatest level of detail is. Since phones and digital cameras keep so much information in their EXIF data, this is relatively easy to do.

But cameras haven’t always kept so much information in their EXIF data.

Happy Thanksgiving!

November 27, 2014 / Tom

Happy Thanksgiving

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

For those who are also celebrating the holiday, I hope you have a great day hanging out with friends and family and enjoying the food, the naps (well, if you can fit it in), and the general time off.

For those who aren’t celebrating Thanksgiving, I still hope your day is just as awesome (perhaps you can find the time to hang out with some friends or family or get some good food, as well :).

I’ll be resuming my usual posts tomorrow morning. Until then, enjoy the day!

Getting Started with WordPress Taxonomies

November 26, 2014 / Tom

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For those who are just getting started in WordPress development, one of the more challenging aspects of working with some of the extended APIs is that of WordPress taxonomies.

Perhaps it’s because the term is one that’s not often used, perhaps it’s because it’s something that’s a little difficult to understand; however, whatever the case, I’m aiming to try to simplify the topic in my latest series on Tuts+.

A Quick Tip To Extract Data with RegEx

November 25, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

In a recent project, one of the features that I was working on required that the application make periodic calls to a third-party API in order to retrieve a piece of information to be used later throughout the application.

This piece of data changes over time (though the intervals are irregular) and the end point to which the application connects doesn’t return a standard XML, JSON, or the information in any other standard protocol. Instead, it returns a string of mixed HTML and JavaScript.

The piece of key information is prefixed stored in a JavaScript so it’s easy to get the proverbial bearings from the API’s response, but in terms of grabbing the unique data, it requires some work to extract the data with a regular expression.

Open Source Criticism (Closed Source is Better!)

November 24, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

This weekend, WordPress Lead Developer Andrew Nacin shared a link to a short, but interesting article from the CEO of Slack.

Though the article, in its entirety, is worth a read, one of the biggest points made in the article (and in the associated tweet) is:

I feel that what we have right now is just a giant piece of shit. Like, it’s just terrible and we should be humiliated that we offer this to the public. Not everyone finds that motivational, though.

For anyone who has worked in software for long enough to release something to be public (be it 100 users or 100,000 users), this statement is kinda validating isn’t it?

That is, for the majority of the programmers that I know (including myself) both online and offline, I rarely hear any of them talk about how proud they are of the entire architecture of their application. Sure, some talk about parts they are proud of, but more often than not, it’s more about the general problems they have with the current state of the entire system.

The interesting bit is that for those who care about what we’re doing, we try to read books, blogs, articles and discuss topics that go into building quality software. And software, in this sense, isn’t limited to a desktop application – this can be a mobile app, a web application, a web site, a WordPress theme, or even a small JavaScript application that runs in the context of a larger site.

Regardless, it’s easier to talk about how things should be rather than writing things how they should be. Good thing we have that whole refactoring bit, right?

But that’s beside the point of what I’m actually getting at. Instead, the point I’m trying to make is that I think open source software often times is far more harshly criticized than its closed source counterpart.

And why shouldn’t it be?

My Suite of Apps: Better Rename 9

Happy Thanksgiving!

Getting Started with WordPress Taxonomies

A Quick Tip To Extract Data with RegEx

Open Source Criticism (Closed Source is Better!)

Current Projects