Author: Tom (Page 348 of 430)

My Day-To-Day: Managing Social Media

March 5, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

Last week, I wrote about my first Day-To-Day post on Getting Things Done. In the comments, Kevin asked the following question:

Tom, do you schedule time to use Twitter and general interneting or are you able to work with intermittent distractions?

The truth is, I was actually going to include this in the original post, but it was getting a bit long so I thought it made more sense to break it out into a separate post.

TL;DR: I don’t use a Twitter client on my phone, I check in a few times a day, I generally don’t use Facebook, and I use Path for my closest friends and family.

Of course, there’s a bit more to it than that.

Some Thoughts on Building WordPress Plugins

March 4, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

With the exception of Standard and contract projects, I generally don’t build WordPress themes for release.

I tend to favor plugins because I’m attracted to the functionality that they are able to introduce to the core WordPress application and, frankly, I don’t have the design chops required to produce a theme of high enough quality.

Simply put, I try to focus on what I’m good at doing so others can do the same.

Last week, I talked about the problem of offering support for free WordPress plugins, the challenges that I’m currently facing, and ultimately what I’m aiming to do about it.

So in keeping consistent with trying to share my general thought process on both plugin development and moving to a better business model, I thought I’d also share some thoughts on building WordPress plugins. Continue reading

Interviewed By Erik Ford

March 1, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

Late last month, Erik Ford of Pixel8 contacted me about doing an interview for his blog.

Since I enjoy getting to know other people in the design and development space, and am always humbled when approached to do the same, I obliged.

Tag Sticky Post Updated To 1.2

March 1, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

Earlier this week, I received a following forum notification in my inbox regarding Tag Sticky Post:

I’ve downloaded the plugin Tag Sticky Post that will allow me to stick posts depending on which tag I’m currently browsing in my blog. The tag that will be checked is from the post’s custom_field “tag_sticky_post”. So, if I go inside the post and set post “A” to stick on tag “1”, if I go to http://www.myblog.com/tag/1 the post “A” will be shown on the top with a custom css class (to highlight it). So far so good.

The problem is that the plugin can’t seem to work when I’m browsing archives for 2 tags at the same time, like the example I gave above:

Example: http://www.myblog.com/tag/tag1+tag2

You can view the entire post here.

This prompted an update to the plugin that I’ll discuss in more length in another post, but first note that this particular use case provided a perfect example of the type of enhancement that fit with the vision of the plugin.

So yesterday, I officially released Tag Sticky Post 1.2.

jQuery Konami Code: Add The Cheat Code To Your Site

February 28, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

Be sure to check out the latest release of the plugin!

One of the things that I love about working on side projects is that they can be just as complex or simple, or as fun or mundane as you want them to be.

Case in point: A couple of years ago when 8BIT was first getting started, we had a really simple landing page, but we had the idea to incorporate something fun.

Considering we all group up during the 8-bit era of video games, we opted to incorporate the Konami code into our site. So I wrote a small jQuery plugin that makes it really easy to include the cheat code into your site or web application.

Simply put, it’s the jQuery Konami Code.