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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.

What We Publish is Our Legacy

October 20, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

A few weeks ago, the WordPress community (and the world) lost an amazing person: Alex King. You can read much more about who he was as well as a round-up of tweets and posts all about him on WP Tavern.

Our Legacy

I’m not a fan of trying to summarize a person’s life in a quote or a sentence so I won’t be doing that. Instead, I wanted to highlight that Alex did something that’s been on my mind ever since I first read the post:

One of the things my wife and I are trying to do is put together some information about my career that will hopefully give my 6 year-old daughter a better sense of who I was as an adult. She knows me as “dad”, but when she gets older she’ll be curious about who I was to my peers and colleagues.

Take the time to read the entire post and its feedback, as well.

Whenever we lose people that have made a significant impact on our lives, be it directly or indirectly, it can be a challenge to process it. I don’t think it gets any easier nor do I believe it’s supposed to, either.

With that said, I’ve been thinking about how so many of us are sharing content via our blogs and how this may impact the legacy we leave behind.

In short, what we publish can be come part of our legacy.

Using Sucuri Antivirus for WordPress

October 19, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

A couple of weeks ago, I talked about how there’s no such thing as the perfect WordPress host. In the end, it comes down to the requirements of your project that will dictate what host is best for your project.

But what happens when you find yourself placed in this dilemma:

There’s a host that you want to use because of some of the features, but it doesn’t fit the bill for the rest of the project.

Case in point: One of the things that’s popular right now is to have software such as a malware or a virus scanner. And who would fault anyone for wanting that?

I’m a fan of it and it’s something I recommend to most anyone running a web application. In my mind, anything that saves user input of any type should have something like this.

That said, one of the hosts that I often recommend does not have this built-in. So I’ve opted to go with Sucuri Antivirus.

Sucuri Antivirus

I’m a big fan of the service.

Tom McFarlin

Two Reasons For a Changelog

Debugging Minified Files in WordPress

When Clients Disappear Without Paying

What We Publish is Our Legacy

Using Sucuri Antivirus for WordPress