Author: Tom (Page 335 of 427)

Hey, Wait – Don’t “Mark All As Read!”

May 1, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

Last week, I talked mentioned I try to write every day. Personal stuff aside, it’s clear that I aim to write for this particular blog five days a week.

Though I’ve no plans to change that, I’ve know that writing daily can create a backlog for readers that makes it difficult to keep up with.

Ultimately, this results in readers opting not to discuss anything in the comments, or it results in subscribers calling bankruptcy on the RSS feed.

To that and (and perhaps somewhat ironically), I’m curious as to what you guys think as well as hearing your thoughts on some potential alternatives.

How To Enable SSL in MAMP

April 30, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

In my developer toolbox post, I’ve covered that I prefer to use to MAMP for local development. For the most part, the default settings (or some variation thereof) work just fine; however, if you end up needing to do some work on a secure site, then you’ll need enable SSL in MAMP.

On production-level servers, you’ll need to have purchased an SSL certificate; however, MAMP makes it trivially easy to setup a certificate in your development environment.

WordPress For Rapid Application Development

April 29, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

Last week, I talked about using WordPress as an application platform – once again, even – but Ted Waller brought up an interesting comment that I’ve not heard (at least here on this blog) that I wanted to discuss a bit more.

Specifically, Ted said:

Whether or not it’s wise to use it as the final application framework, I do think it’s very good for rapid prototypes of web apps.

And what really caught my attention about this particular comment was that I’ve not often heard of WordPress as being a tool for rapid application development (or RAD).

The thing is, RAD – for whatever reason – has often been used whenever someone is talking about prototyping an application or doing some type of development, but nothing that’s seriously ready for prime time, for the enterprise, or for whatever term you’d opt to use.

But the more I thought about it, the more I wondered:

Is rapid application development misunderstood?
Is WordPress truly good for RAD or is it the best of both worlds?

My Day-To-Day: Write Every Day

April 26, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

For those of us who actually, y’know, like writing and try to write every day, it’s never been tougher to actually settle on a platform on which to do so.

Off the top of my head, the following services are available:

But we live in the age of a noisy Internet. Obviously, I love writing as much as the next person, but the problem with many publishing platforms is that they are all designed to be public.

And the thing is, not everything we have to say needs to be shared with everyone.

TL;DR: I think that writing every day is something that many people should do, but not everything we need to write needs to be done so in a public manner. Day One has been one of the best applications that I’ve found that makes it easy to write every day without publishing it for the world to see.

Adding a Custom Post Type To An Existing Menu

April 25, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

Up until this point, I’ve never worked on a project or done any type of work that required a custom post type to be added to an existing menu in the WordPress dashboard.

For the most part, I’m generally of the mindset that custom post types should:

Exist as top level menus
Should be added at the bottom of the WordPress dashboard menu

This mentality is primarily motivated by the fact that I see the core WordPress menu options as first-class citizens in the dashboard, custom post types as being second-class citizens.

That’s just a rule of thumb, though. There are always exceptions.

But there are also times where custom post types could be treated as, say, third-class citizens where they should be integrated with an existing menu be it a core menu or another custom post type menu.

Luckily, it’s trivially easy to add a custom post type as a menu item to an existing menu.