Author: Tom (Page 43 of 428)

Time Off 2019: Part 3 of 4 of Social Media Sabbaticals (No Time for Four)

December 4, 2019 / Tom

If you’ve followed along with the previous articles this year, you’ll notice that I didn’t actually take time off each quarter.

As I head into December of this year, this will be the final – and obviously the third – time I take off the social web for the remainder of the year. At least that’s the plan. I’m thinking of doing it a little bit differently this year.

For those of you who haven’t read about my doing this in years past, check out:

Though I don’t really do year in review posts, going back to read these and see how things have panned out over the years is always fun and is as close to retrospectives as I get.

With all of that said, I’d summarize the entire year by saying: It’s been a year, if nothing else. Some ways bad, some was fantastic.

Introducing Remove Empty Shortcodes

December 3, 2019 / Tom

Last week, I discussed everything that went my decision on retiring site memberships. For those who were members (or even read the initial idea), you may recall that I was using Restrict Content Pro to power the site.

When retiring the memberships, I wanted to make sure I was able to maintain the integrity of all of the posts that I’d published simply without the shortcode that comes with RCP.

What started off as a simple plugin to remove the RCP shortcode turned into a plugin to remove all empty shortcodes. I’m opting to open the plugin’s repository so anyone can access it (or contribute issues, code, or create their own fork from it).

At the time of this writing, the plugin is at 0.4.0 so there’s not much to expect. But I enjoy reading the what and why other developers do in their projects, so I’m going to do so with Remove Empty Shortcodes.

Happy Thanksgiving

November 28, 2019 / Tom

Though I doubt many people are reading articles like this today, I still enjoy sharing a short note on Thanksgiving Day (here in the States, of course) to look back at what’s happened in the past year.

On Retiring Site Memberships

November 26, 2019 / Tom

After two years after writing a lot of content and giving exclusive access to site members, this past weekend I opened the site to everyone.

In short:

https://twitter.com/tommcfarlin/status/1198689233017430017

But this wasn’t a small nor was it a quick decision and it’s not something that I opted to on a whim. For those who were subscribed to the newsletter earlier this year, I made an announcement that this was coming.

You Should Be Using PHP Filtering Functions, Part 2

November 19, 2019 / Tom

In the previous post, I talked about the reasons using PHP filtering functions is more useful rather than not.

In short, doing so helps to provide a level of validation that’s built into the language so that we don’t have to re-write something. Naturally, there are caveats.

For example, if you’re having to validate a value that is of non-Latin characters, then you’re going to go have to go it alone and implement validation with perhaps a regular expression.

But if you’re using email addresses, URLs, numbers, IP addresses, and so many more things, then you’re in a good position to use something that already exists.

Anyway, all of the above is still about filtering variables. What about inputs, though? That is, those that come from $_POST or $_GET. It’s possible to use a similar strategy with a different function and different filter set.

But if you understand the basics presented in the last post, then this post will not be very different.