Tom McFarlin

Software Engineering in WordPress, PHP, and Backend Development

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Don’t Be Afraid To Ask For Help

This weekend, a fellow tweep and developer shot me a short question that I think hits home for anyone who’s involved in development regardless of skill level:

Question for you, do you find it hard to ask for help when you get stuck on some code?

Perhaps I should’ve just easily said “Don’t be afraid to ask for help!” but my short, 140-character-or-less answer was:

no. early in my career i did, but not anymore.

But this is one of those things that’s so common for many of us and since Twitter greatly limits just how much we can say (which is a good thing, in some cases), I thought it worth talking a little bit more in-depth about it

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My Suite of Apps: Picturelife

There are a lot of services that have come up in recent years all of which are designed to provide a level of photo storage and/or to provide you a way to “back in time” to see pictures that were taken n-number of years ago.

And it’s fun, right? I mean, who doesn’t dig seeing what they were doing, tweeting, or sharing a year, two years, …, or 11 years ago?

Such is what the Internet has brought us.

Anyway, when I set out to find a service that I wanted to use to backup all of my pictures and videos, I was looking for several criteria:

  • Unlimited back up
  • Web application
  • iOS Application
  • “Memory” feature to see things that happened over however-many-years ago

There’s a lot of options out there for this – some are free, some are paid, some require Facebook for authentication – some do part of what I wanted, some do other parts of what I wanted except for Picturelife.

It does it all (that is, all that I want).

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Premium or Commercial Themes (Which is it?)

One of the discussions that I’ve seen crop up more than once is the debate as to which should those themes for which we pay be called Premium Themes or Commercial Themes.

Though I personally call them Premium Themes, there have been times in which I’ve casually referred to something as a Commercial Theme. And this is something that we could all debate ad nauseum and probably still not come up with a definitive answer, so I realize the potential futility of writing a post like this, but my curiousity is piqued:

What is the best term to use when talking about themes that much be purchased?

For me, it’s a matter of looking at the basic definitions.

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The WordPress Post Editor Doesn’t Suck (Though We Might Be Lazy)

There was a great article written on WP Tavern yesterday entitled Why WordPress Doesn’t Need To Fear Ghost, Yet.

And before I go any further, I want to be absolutely clear that as much as I know that people who are involved in WorPress love a good dramatic story – especially one that involves mudslinging and controversial statements that generate all kinds of fun conversations in comments and on Twitter – this is not one of those stories.

WP Tavern

Don’t read it that way, don’t spin it that way, and don’t try to twist any of the words that are in here as that’s that the purpose of what I’m trying to say.

Instead, this is my take on two of specific topics that were discussed in the article.

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My Suite of Apps: Safari

I know – Chrome is arguably the best web browser (or at least the most popular) on the market right now. Ever since the first version was released, I used it religiously (and I used Firebug and Firefox when I needed developer tools until Chrome’s finally shipped).

But when the latest version of OS X shipped, I decided to give Safari a try if for no other reason to see if the claims about its speeds were true, and to take advantage of Continuity.

Like any other web developer, I still have other browsers sitting on my machine so that I can use them for testing and so on, but I’ve actually been using nothing but Safari since Yosemite’s launch and I haven’t missed my other browsers.

In fact, I’ve enjoyed using Safari more than any other browser because of its integration with other devices.

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