Author: Tom (Page 340 of 427)

Strip Hidden ASCII Characters

April 2, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

Late last week, I was working on a project that was responsible for reading the contents of a CSV, parsing the information, and then inserting it into the WordPress database.

But I hit a snag (as we so often do, right?): The first few rows of the CSV were working fine, but a number of the rows were failing to import.

The thing is, there appeared to be no rhyme or reason. I made sure the CSV was a raw text file and even saved a new version of the file using a raw editor twice to make sure any, um, ‘stray’ characters were being removed.

Unfortunately, it didn’t work so rather than spend time trying to reformat the entire file, I ended up writing a small regex to strip hidden ASCII characters form the incoming information.

WordPress Documentation For Free and Premium Projects

April 1, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

If you spend time maintaining a WordPress project – be it a theme, plugin, or application, and regardless of if it’s free or premium – then you know the challenges that come with writing and maintaining documentation for your project.

Sure, I think many of us who build and maintain projects consider documentation a form of support, but when you ask a customer to define support, you’re more likely to hear about their ability to communicate with someone through a forum or a phone call (depending on your service).

I mean, case in point, when I think about support for my cellular service, I don’t think of documentation of Sprint’s network. I think of talking to a person.

Anyway, all that to say is that over the past few years of working with various types of projects – both on my own and with my team – the trend seems to be that documentation for free projects is expected, but ignored, whereas documentation for premium projects is not only expected, but also read.

But I write this to ask if this is something the rest of you guys have noticed, and, if so, if there isn’t something that can be done to improve this particular situation or it’s simply the nature of the economy. Continue reading

A Plugin To Display WordPress Tags Without Links

March 29, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

In a few recent client projects, I’ve had the need to display WordPress tags without links. Sure, this is relatively easy to do with a `foreach` loop, but I got tired of writing the same code.

So I decided to write a simple plugin that makes it way to display the tags without links.

Handling The Fragmentation of WordPress Versions, Themes, and Plugins

March 28, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

For the past few weeks, I’ve been talking about the decision to migrate away from the WordPress Plugins Repository and move back to the premium model similar to what I once offered. The truth is, this is going to introduce a bit of WordPress fragmentation which may not be a good thing.

If you’re just catching up on this, here are a few articles about the migration:

I’ve enjoyed the discussion around all of this, but there’s one problem that is introduced when developers opt to move away from the central WordPress repository.

It introduces fragmentation into the market.

On Software Developer Arrogance

March 27, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

There are a lot of things that are true about the software development community. Some of it good, some of it bad, but one of the thing that constantly rubs me the wrong what is software developer arrogance.

During my talk at WordCamp Atlanta, I stated the following:

When it comes to development, know that there is always someone better than you.

If you’ve been involved in any kind of development community for any amount of time, then you know that developers are opinionated people. In fact, the truth is that some are simply arrogant. They are more concerned with showing what they’ve done than hearing about you or learning form others.

Sure, everyone has their stereotypes and it sucks that we’re subjected to them, but acknowledging that someone is better than you – or that you’re better than someone else (in a certain area, that is) – doesn’t have to be an act of arrogance.

During the course of the talk, I tried to convey that acknowledging exactly this can be a very liberating thing. Continue reading