Author: Tom (Page 324 of 427)

My Day-To-Day: Listen to Podcasts

July 5, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

One of the things that I try to make sure that I do at least once a day is listen to podcasts. Honestly, I try to listen to several throughout the day, but it really depends on what all I have going on.

For the most part, I listen to podcasts whenever I’m in the car driving or I’m out on a run. Sure, there are only so many podcasts or so much of a podcast than you can listen to on any given, but this has worked pretty well for me for the past few years.

On top of that, I’ve given a number of podcast applications a fair shake and have come away with a favorite. But I’ll cover that in a second.

Resolving “Invalid Regular Expression Flag” in JavaScript

July 4, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

Thanks to modern browsers, writing cross-browser compatible JavaScript isn’t nearly as difficult as it was even just a few years ago; however, there are still times when you get cryptic error messages such as “invalid regular expression flag.”

Just as Jamie Zawinski said:

Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll use regular expressions.” Now they have two problems.

It’s funny because it’s true, right? But we still have regular expressions, they’re still powerful, and we still use them.

Unfortunately, there are still times in which they can plague us when working with JavaScript, string replacement, and modern web browsers.

Press Start: Summer Blogging Bootcamp

July 3, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

Last week, we held our first Press Start event at the office and had an awesome time of hanging out and meeting other bloggers, sharing various ideas about how to actually maintain a blog, and generally getting some writing done.

In fact, we collectively wrote over 30 posts in a single hour.

But now that summer is in full swing, we’ve got a list of events planned for the upcoming season the first of which is geared towards those of you who are looking to go from nothing to something in one day.

We’re going to cover how to setup and configure your blog as well as talk through some strategies to help you get to publishing quickly.

How To Have WordPress Check if a User Exists

July 2, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

When it comes to building web applications, I’m a fan of letting a user use their email as their primary login – in fact, I’d go as far as to say that I wish our email was our primary identity: They are unique, it’s a single thing to remember, and we all must have them in order to get online these days.

To that end, whenever I’m working on an application that requires a username and password, I always default to using the email address for the user’s identification. Everything else can be managed in a profile setting, right?

If you’re building an application in WordPress where you’re building custom registration mechanisms through your own views, validation, and so on, you may find yourself needing to check to see if a user already exists.

And if you – like me – often use email as the user name, there’s a really easy way to perform this check.

Go Ahead and Admit Your Mistakes

July 1, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

Arguably, one of the easiest observations to make about the development community is that we’re not exactly the best at admitting our mistakes. Admitting our mistakes is akin to admitting that we were wrong or that we didn’t know what we were doing and no one likes to do that.

Naturally, right?

It’s human nature to want to showcase our successes and mask our failures, but the truth is that no one has any success without actually failing (and likely several times over at that).

Lame.

Unfortunately, I think that developers may be more notorious than others for this. We’re good at criticism, trolling, and flat out demeaning other people’s work, but we’re not so good at accepting it when it comes back around to us.

Although this is may be a bit idealistic, it shouldn’t be that way.