Tom McFarlin

Software Engineering in WordPress, PHP, and Backend Development

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Scheduled Post Shortcut for WordPress

Scheduled Post Shortcut for WordPress is officially available in the WordPress Plugin Repository and is the second plugin that’s officially available via Pressware.

A few months ago, Easier Excerpts was a plugin that was released to help make it just a little bit easier to manage excerpts when composing blog posts.

Scheduled Post Shortcut is another plugin that attempts to stay in the same vein of simplicity while also making it easier to streamline the publishing process.

But what does that mean and what’s the story behind the plugin?

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A Look at Freemius Checkout

At the end of last year, I had the chance to meet Vova Feldman and see what he was working on with Freemius. It was a cool product, to be sure, and it’s been neat to see it take off over the last few months.

Just as I did with Freemius, I had a chance to see what else Vova has been working on and this time it’s something geared towards those who are selling products via their site.

Thus, there’s the aptly named Freemius Checkout. This product is geared specifically to those who are looking to sell plugins or themes.

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It’s Not a Sad State of Web Development

Like many of you, I use Pocket to file the articles I want to read or bookmark for future reference. Sometimes, I get around to reading them; other times, I never actually come back to them. The latter is a perpetual problem I have to get a handle on, but I digress.

Pocket

For the most part, I try to stick to a single topic of WordPress-related development on this blog. But there are times where I see things tangentially related as it comes to our industry (or even just our part of the industry).

Regarding Pocket, the whole reason I bring this up is that I was just spending time in my account preparing to declare bankruptcy in my set of articles. The goal was to clear out everything that was in there (isn’t that what bankruptcy is?), but I found some other articles that I still want to have available to read and to archive for reference.

But in deleting all of the articles that I found, I couldn’t help but notice a pattern of disappointing article titles and subject matter.

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An Embarrassing First Release

I’ve talked before about my idea of shipping a “strong 1.0” when it comes to working on projects for yourself or other people but what if that version is an embarrassing first release?

There’s a quote that many of us are familiar with (and that I’ve referenced here before, too):

If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, then you’ve launched too late.

It’s attributed to Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn.

I think it’s something that’s good to remember, but sometimes I wonder if we use it as a crutch when shipping something and as a rationalization to cut corners.

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Timedropper – A jQuery Time Plugin

There’s some programmer joke that says there are two things hard in computer science: naming things and time zones. On second thought, maybe that’s not the joke at all (because it sounds too true to be funny).

Whatever. The point of this post isn’t to try to make jokes, but to share something useful for working with time zones in the context of JavaScript.

Specifically, I’m talking about Timedropper. It’s a cool jQuery time plugin designed to make it easy for you to implement options into your web application that gives users an intuitive way to work with time.

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