Author: Tom (Page 354 of 427)

The Dangers of Herd Mentality in Online Publishing

January 22, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

Blogging can be a really weird hobby especially in the development space. Obviously, the majority of what I personally write is geared towards developers – at least on some level.

Some articles are straight up “How To’s” (such as get a post ID by its meta value) that are meant for anyone. Others are meant for people who may be experienced in software development, but not necessarily WordPress, and others are geared towards open conversation in which anyone that works as (or for!) a developer can have an opinion.

But there’s a problem with this: Whenever you – or I – opt to write an op-ed piece about why someone should avoid using a certain plugin or practice, or we share how certain things are Doing It Wrong rather than Doing It Right, or anything of like, we run the risk of cultivating an environment that fools us into thinking our perspective is of much more significance or is much more “correct” than it really is.

MaxCDN Giveaway: Ten 1TB Accounts!

January 21, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

When it comes to managing a blog, one of the pressure points that many of us feel – at some point – is how to manage the amount of bandwidth our site requires in order to serve the assets.

Case in point: if you’re a designer and you’re serving large images to your audience, you can drastically impact their experience with your site with how fast your server provides the images.

Similarly, if you’re a developer and you’re serving up files for people to download as examples of your work, then bandwidth is required to send the data across the wire. And the same goes for people producing videos, musicians sharing their work, and so on.

For many of us, we start off on a budget-friendly hosting plan and then drop some cash on a beefier server when the time comes. The thing is, there’s middle ground between the two: introducing caching.

Specifically, setup caching such that all of your assets are hosted on a content delivery network that will host the files and make downloading the data that much faster for your readers and/or visitors without taxing your server.

Granted, this can cost a little bit extra, but I am proud to announce a MaxCDN giveaway.

Indie Game: The Movie and Work, Audience, & Motivation

January 18, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

Last week, I watched Indie Game: The Movie (it’s available on Netflix, so check it out if you subscribe). Overall, it was an extremely well-done documentary – very well-polished, very well-produced, and told the story of several developers in such a way that you genuinely care about what happens to them and their games.

But aside from all of that, I loved seeing the similarities between the game developers and the passion that they demonstrated for their games, their fears in building a product and how it would be received, and the battles they fought with people who would simultaneously use their product all the while insulting them publicly via the Internet.

Though these aren’t necessarily take aways, they’re interesting parallels nonetheless. Some I’ve seen in my own life, some I’ve wanted to avoid in my own life.

Why I Terminate Blocks with Code Comments

January 17, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

Thanks to a number of open source contributors, I released WP Audio Player 1.3 to the WordPress plugin repository. For one of the pull requests, I mentioned the following:

I always terminate my blocks with a closing comment. Please keep this in the file.

Travis Northcutt also asked me about it via Twitter:

@tommcfarlin curious about always terminating blocks with a closing comment – what's the rationale there?

— Travis Northcutt (@tnorthcutt) January 14, 2013

When it comes to writing code, I try hard to make sure that anything I do that’s outside of the normal coding conventions for a given platform has a rationale behind it.

Case in point: Ending my terminating braces with code comments.

Yet Another Blogging Podcast – Episode 3: Scheduling Your Time

January 17, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

In the last episode of Yet Another Blogging Podcast, I shared several tips for generating and collecting ideas. Specifically, I discussed using your opinions, learning from existing projects, various material that you read, watch, or hear, and/or inspiration that you garner from other sites.

As I’ve said in the previous episodes, this isn’t meant to be the definitive guide to blogging. It’s nothing more than practical advice that I’ve found that has worked for me, and that answers a number of questions that I’ve received in previous posts and/or emails.

So, with that said, hopefully there will be something useful in this episode.