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Your Annoying Blog Habits (Are Now Mine)

October 27, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

Those of us who spend the majority of our workday (or even our entire day) on the web have strong opinions on how certain things should or shouldn’t be.

That is, we have ideas on how things should or shouldn’t work:

Modals are annoying and are of no use.
Mailing lists are generally meant for spam and product upsells.
Retweeting content you’ve already tweeted is redundant and annoying.
…and so on.

And maybe I’m off base in generalizing here. I mean, this is exactly how I viewed certain things for a long time.

But the more I interacted with others who live in a variety of timezones, and the more research I did on topics as it relates to blogging, the more began to second guess my initial opinions.

How Not To Upsell Your Product

October 26, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

I’m usually not into the whole “call out other applications when they do something I dislike.” That is, unless it’s something that I think is unethical or straight up dangerous or stupid.

We all have our boundaries.

To that end, I won’t be mentioning a specific application in this post. But I’m going to be using one as an example of how not to upsell your product.

Two Reasons For a Changelog

October 23, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

You’ve likely often heard of programmers talking about change logs. Whether you’ve heard good things depends upon the developers with whom you’ve interacted.

At least keep track of it somewhere.

Sometimes, I think we get a little exhausted writing change logs. This ends up manifesting itself in half-baked commit messages or in lack of a changelog.

But if you’re a programmer responsible for leading a project be it as a freelancer or as part of a team, the importance of a changelog should not missed.

Debugging Minified Files in WordPress

October 22, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

As much as I’m a proponent of concatenating and minifying dependencies, it’s not without challenges. Sure, this is includes both stylesheets and JavaScript, but I’m specifically talking about debugging minified files in WordPress.

A minified bug. Get it?

It’s one thing to have your JavaScript files separated and organized in your Development. But when it’s time to deploy to Production, you should be aiming for a few minified files.

For example, say a client contacts you claiming something on their site isn’t working? You load up the site, you check the browser console and see there’s an error in the JavaScript.

Wait. You’ve minified all the files.

So what now?

When Clients Disappear Without Paying

October 21, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

When starting a business, there’s a lot of things to think about. For example:

The idea of working for yourself is exciting
The challenges of managing your own retirement can be tough
Navigating the tax code can be tougher (get a CPA!)
Keeping your own books can be tedious
Working with clients can be a lot of fun, but also tough
…and so on.

A lot of it is exciting, some of it is scary, and some of the it you might expect but don’t really know how to handle until it actually happens.

Case in point:

When working with a client, what do you do when you’ve completed a project, they disappear, and they don’t pay the final invoice?

This is when self-employment gets a little tougher.

Tom McFarlin

Your Annoying Blog Habits (Are Now Mine)

How Not To Upsell Your Product

Two Reasons For a Changelog

Debugging Minified Files in WordPress

When Clients Disappear Without Paying