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A Quick Fix For Google Web Font Rendering

March 25, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

Like many, Chrome is my browser of choice, but the past couple of updates have resulted in some problems specifically with Google web font rendering (as well as some other web font rendering).

I had considered linking to a number of different issues that I had seen in bug trackers, but you can see just how popular this particular issue has gotten by performing a quick Google search.

To be honest, I’m not sure if this is relegated only to Chrome or to all WebKit-based browsers.

Anyway, since Chrome normally does silent version updates in the background, this should be fixed in an upcoming version – last I checked, it was resolved in the latest build of Chromium – but until then, I thought it may be worth sharing one way to fix the issue.
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Are You the Smartest Person in the Room?

March 24, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

Recently, I heard a quote that has stuck with me. I can’t remember word-for-word how it was used, but the paraphrase is:

If you’re the smartest person in the room, then you need to find another room.

It sounds a little weird (and potentially even a little offensive) without knowing the context.

In short, it was said during a conversation about leadership and the importance of surrounding yourself with other smart people (well, smarter people), knowing that just because you may be the first person at a place doesn’t make you the smartest, and not being afraid to ask for insight, criticism, and advice in a variety of areas.

The topic had nothing to do with programming, development, or anything remotely close to that; however, I’ve been thinking about not only how it relates to this particular industry, but how it relates directly to me and my career.

A Practical Example of The WordPress Heartbeat API

March 21, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

The WordPress Heartbeat API is not exactly a new feature. That is, it was first released in WordPress 3.6. Maybe I’ve just done a poor job of keeping up with what others are doing with the API, or maybe I’ve just not paid attention to some of the stuff that people are doing with the API, but I haven’t seen that many examples other than how to get started with it.

On top of that, the Heartbeat API codex is lacking in documentation (though this is an open source project, so if anyone’s to blame, it’s all of us), so perhaps that’s a reason that few people have begun to implement it into their projects.

Whatever the reason, I thought it may be worth showing a practical example of how I recently implemented it within a theme I’m working on, and how I’m using it within conjunction with the Theme Customizer so that when an administrator makes a change to the theme using the Theme Customizer, the visitor will automatically (or is it automagically?) see the changes.

Updates To Markdown Code For WordPress (0.5.1)

March 20, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

One of the small plugins that I’ve maintained – and used – for sometime is the Markdown Code For WordPress plugin.

I initially wrote the plugin last year as a way to easily include my most frequently used markdown syntax into my post and comment editing.

Specifically, the plugin supports:

Backticks for `code`.
Single-asterisks *for emphasis*.
Double-asterisks **for strong**.

That’s all – short and sweet.

But with some of the latest changes to Jetpack and while I’ve been working on a number of smaller projects (or cleaning house of some of them), I went ahead and made some minor updates to the plugin.

The Latest Branch of the WordPress Plugin Boilerplate

March 19, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

Just shy of a month ago, I shared some information about the state of the WordPress Plugin Boilerplate.

Specifically, I mentioned the following:

We’re working on rewriting it to be cleaner, easier to understand, and more flexible for developers of all experience.
I’ve got a small, core team of volunteers helping me out (who I greatly appreciate).
Where we’re headed with this latest version of the project.

To be honest, I’ve never been more excited about the project.

There’s a lot more coming down the pipeline that I’ll cover later in this post – I also want to clear up some fun versioning quirks that I’ve been asked about – but I wanted to give a heads up on the current state of the codebase and where you can follow along with the development as we begin to push code.

Tom McFarlin

A Quick Fix For Google Web Font Rendering

Are You the Smartest Person in the Room?

A Practical Example of The WordPress Heartbeat API

Updates To Markdown Code For WordPress (0.5.1)

The Latest Branch of the WordPress Plugin Boilerplate