Author: Tom (Page 358 of 427)

How Do You Vet Your Ideas?

January 4, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

One of the challenges of working in the development space is being able to separate your good ideas from your bad ideas.

By that, I mean that most of us who enjoy doing what we do probably have a ton of ideas and pet projects that we’d love to get started on, but there always seems to be several hurdles that crop up.

We’re either sidetracked by client work which is good because we need to pay the bills
By existing projects which generally require maintenance
Or by the time that we actually get to work on what we want to do, we’ve convinced ourselves that it isn’t worth doing or we’ve lost the motivation to do it. What is that?

Then again, maybe this is just me – but I doubt it.

How To Get The Post ID By Post Meta Value

January 3, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

One of the nicest and most flexible aspects of the WordPress API is the ability to associate meta data with certain models – for lack of a better term – in the database.

That is, we can assign meta value to Users, Posts, Authors, and so on.

Retrieving the data is typically trivially easy. Simply supply the ID of the model in question and then pass the key value for said post meta.

But what if you need to get the post ID or post meta key by the meta value instead?

Less – A Minimal WordPress Theme By Jared Erickson

January 2, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

When it comes to sharing resources, I try to do a good job of publishing that stuff that I’ve found useful or that I don’t think is necessarily getting the attention that it deserves.

The majority of my friends who are developers or designers maintain their own blogs and publish their own stuff, so I rarely see the need to cross-post any content.

But there are times I make exceptions and such is the case with Less – a free minimal WordPress theme.

Introducing A Podcast About Blogging

December 31, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

Though I’m not planning to venture into doing any type of video blogging on discussing WordPress, there were a number of comments that I received on both of those posts as well as my post on three things I’ve learned from blogging that posed several interesting questions:

“I was hoping you could explain how you made that step and perhaps even give as an insight into your process.”
“Things like how you collect post ideas, how much time you spend writing, how difficult it was to get to and maintain this writing schedule and how much it has helped your career.”
“How much time you spend writing vs. “doing real work” (development)?”
“Do you even put aside your developer’s hat for a while and do nothing but write?”
“It’s very difficult to find things worth writing about and to continue despite little to no positive reinforcement.”
“Where do you find inspiration from to write? Do you browse any sites like Quora or Stack Overflow to get a sense of what’s popular, etc?”

After giving this some thought, I’ve decided to run a miniseries – for lack of a better term – of podcasts that talk about blogging, what I’ve learned from doing it, my process, and a couple of other tips I have for both aspiring and budding bloggers.

How To File and Manage a WordPress Plugin Bug Report

December 31, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

When it comes to WordPress development, there typically tends to be two camps (with a third that’s on the rise):

There are theme developers
There are plugin developers
Then there is the growing field of application developers

Personally, I’m a fan of building plugins. Obviously, it’s not because I have anything against building themes, but I’m a programmer – not a designer – by nature, so I add to the WordPress experience through functionality rather than functionality and design.

In fact, I think if I had to design, it’d probably take away from the experience :).

But plugins are software and there are problems that have existed as long as software has existed. In fact, entire markets have been created around said problem: filing bug reports.

I’m not here to provide the ultimate solution for how to provide a WordPress plugin bug report – if that existed, it would have been solved long before today; however, I do want to share a couple of things that I’ve noticed.