Author: Tom (Page 361 of 430)

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.

Hello Dolly – Episode 1: The Empire Strikes Back

December 31, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

A couple of weeks ago, my team and I published the first episode of Hello Dolly largely as an experiment to see if we had anything worthwhile to contribute to the podcast-space regarding WordPress.

In fact, the episode was such an experiment that we named it Episode 0.

But based on the feedback via comments, tweets, and emails, it was clear that you guys were interested in the podcast, and so we wanted to publish the first official podcast before the end of the year.

Today, we’ve done just that.

Three Things I’ve Learned From Blogging

December 28, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

One of the cool things about managing a blog that talks significantly about code is the feedback that I get based on certain code snippets I share.

Specifically, I enjoy getting comments that ask why I’ve chosen to do things a certain way versus another. Some of these examples include:

Why have I opted to use functions rather than constants?
Why have I chosen to use a custom query over encapsulating some built in functions?
…and so on.

I think that for most people who manage a blog, they hope that part of what they write is contributing something positive and helpful to the Internet (this isn’t always the case, for sure).

Similarly, I think that people who engage in discussion via thoughtful comments are looking to improve on the original content.

At the risk of committing a generalization, this seems to be the case in most programming blogs. While thinking about this, it did raise a question: