Software Engineering in Web Development, Backend Services, and More

Author: Tom (Page 327 of 432)

A Status Update on WP Audio Player

A few months ago, I released WP Audio Player and it has it has since received a decent number of downloads, feature requests, and other feedback.

WP Audio Player

In fact, it’s rare that a week goes by where someone doesn’t shoot me an email asking about how to do something with the plugin, how to introduce their own features, and so on.

To that end, I wanted to provide a short update to those of you who are fans of the plugin and who are looking for the next version, but who are wondering about its status. Continue reading

On Missions and Visions: Your Brand, Your Company, Yourself

With my recent sharing of my upcoming rebrand and the sharing of some of the things like premium plugins and my choice of support software, I’ve also been giving thoughts to things like mission statements, vision statements, and more.

Truth be told, I’ve almost always considered that kind of stuff to be related more to larger companies or organizations.

But why?

Why is it not applicable to a freelancer, a small team or a small business?

Continue reading

Dev Docs: API Docs For HTML5, CSS3, DOM, JavaScript, and jQuery

Years (or decades? – yikes!) it was relatively easy to get up to speed with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript; however, the web is moving forward and it’s moving forward faster than ever.

The problem with this is that, as developers who stay heads-down busy on stuff, it can be tough to keep up to date with all of the new technologies that are available, what the new APIs are, or how to use them.

A couple of weeks ago, I stumbled across Dev Docs – I spent a few minutes looking at it – but as time has passed, I’ve spent more and more time using it for reference so much so that it has a permanent spot in my bookmarks bar (and that’s sacred space for me). Continue reading

My Third Post on Medium: On Music and Millennials

When it comes to maintaining this site, one of the things that I try to do is stay “on topic.” Looking back through the posts, you see that there are actually very few things that I discuss that aren’t on the topic of development in some capacity.

For what it’s worth, I think having extreme focus on a blog is important. Spreading out too wide dilutes content and leaves you with a mixed-to-no audience.

And that’s why I hesitate sharing some of the stuff like this.

But you know, I’ve always enjoyed seeing what some of my fellow developers are writing and sharing outside of their typical stuff, so I always assume that a post like that now and again doesn’t hurt.

So as I’ve continued to explore Medium and what they’re doing with the service, I wrote a post earlier this week all about music and millennials.

Continue reading

Your WordPress Plugin Idea – What’s The Point?

When it comes to coming up with WordPress plugin ideas (or themes or general applications on any platform, for that matter), we all have different ways of going about doing it.

Some of us do it by scratching our own itch, some of us do it by modifying or adjusting an existing project to meet our needs, some of us dream up a random idea, and some of us do all of the above.

But coming up with an idea for a project is only half of it – you’ve also got to determine if your project serves a particular purpose, solves a particular problem, or has a particular use case.

I mean, very few things in this world are created “just because,” right?

Continue reading

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