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Postmatic for WordPress Comments (and So Much More!)

June 2, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

In November 2014, I stumbled across Postmatic which aimed to make WordPress comments a bit easier to manage (for those who end up getting any form of comments on your blog).

Postmatic for WordPress Comments

Since then, I’ve written several posts about the service. These articles span from 2014 up through the middle of last year:

And to this day, I’m still a fan. Jason, Dylan, and the rest of the team (along with some help from guys like Carl and Josh) have continued to put together an amazing service that makes responding to comments that much easier.

I know: This first little bit sounds a little bit like a sales pitch, and that isn’t my style, so I’ll refrain from talking about the plugin and the service from that angle anymore.

But I will say that I’ve been using Postmatic since the beginning and following up with comments has always been much more pleasant of an experience when I can do it from my inbox.

As the product keeps maturing, more and more useful features are being built into it.

Proposed WordPress Employee Benefits

June 1, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

Though I don’t run a big WordPress agency or a large WordPress shop or anything like that, I often wonder what would a WordPress employee benefits package look like for those who do run those types of shop.

I’m not talking about the standard run-of-the-mill benefits like insurance, retirement, paternity, vacation, maternity leave, paternity leave, etc. I mean, those are all great – don’t get me wrong – but I’m talking about the kinds of things that businesses could offer to their employees that would help them invest in themselves and their career.

Not only would this benefit the employees, but it could help the company, as well.

Social Media and Curtailing the Thrashing

May 31, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

At a high-level, computers work by taking information that’s frequently accessed on the hard disk and loading it into RAM so that when a running application needs it again, it can access it in RAM rather than from the hard drive itself.

The idea behind this is so that it improves performance and this is why having a lot of memory can often give you increased performance. Today, it’s not uncommon to have 16GB of RAM available in a computer, so the amount of information that can be held in RAM is pretty impressive.

Let’s say that you’re running some intense applications, or you’re working with a demanding application, and you’re exhausting the available RAM. What happens then? At this point, the computer ends up thrashing. Sounds like fun (if you’re at a hard rock concert, maybe), right? But the gist of it is that you end up taking information in RAM, writing it back to disk, and then replacing that data with new data from the disk.

Wikipedia defines it like this:

In computer science, thrashing occurs when a computer’s virtual memory subsystem is in a constant state of paging, rapidly exchanging data in memory for data on disk, to the exclusion of most application-level processing. This causes the performance of the computer to degrade or collapse greatly.

The emphasis added is my own because it’s ultimately the point I want to bring up as it relates to the rest of this post.

Ignore Coding Standards in PHP CodeSniffer

May 30, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

For as much as I talk about writing code that conforms to the WordPress Coding Standards and for using tools such as PHP CodeSniffer, there are times where I’ve found that you need to silence the errors for the sake of something you’re trying to do.

Case in point:

WordPress uses global variables to maintain certain data structures. As per the coding standards, you should not change the values of global variables.

As a rule of thumb, this is true. But what about in the case where you need to make a modification to the admin menu (which uses a global variable)?

The State of HTML5 Browser Support

May 27, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

Knowing the state of HTML5 browser support helps to add points of conversation to the debate between what should be a web application and what should be a native application.

Though I don’t think it’s a debate that will end any time soon, I think it’s a good conversation to have.

But with the incredibly fast advances happening in browser technologies, it’s nice to know what APIs we have available and which ones have yet to be implemented.

What’s a good way to track this, though?

Tom McFarlin

Postmatic for WordPress Comments (and So Much More!)

Proposed WordPress Employee Benefits

Social Media and Curtailing the Thrashing

Ignore Coding Standards in PHP CodeSniffer

The State of HTML5 Browser Support