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My Day-To-Day: Updating Old Blog Posts

October 4, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

For anyone that’s maintained blog for any length of time, you’ve likely hit a point where you’ve changed the format of your blog, changed the content of your blog, changed the way you write, or simply gotten better at actually publishing content.

And if any of the above are you true, it’s likely that you’ve had to determine whether or not you want to go back and work through the process of updating old blog posts or leave them as they are.

Depending on how long you’ve been blogging, this could be a huge task; for others, it may not take more than a couple of hours.

WP Gist For GitHub Gist in WordPress

October 3, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

When it comes to embedding source code into posts, I’ve been a fan of the SyntaxHighlighter plugin by Alex Mills for a long time – I’ve used it on every programming blog that I’ve maintained for as long as I can remember.

But ever since GitHub rolled out Gists, I’ve been using those to store frequently used functions, examples of code for posts or other articles, and snippets for which I’d like to have others come in introduce their changes, and/or their comments.

Straight from the Gist homepage:

Gist is a simple way to share snippets and pastes with others. All gists are Git repositories, so they are automatically versioned, forkable and usable from Git.

Easy enough, right?

Perhaps one of the cooler things about gists is that they can be embedded in WordPress posts; however, I’ve had mixed success with the native support in doing that.

But Michael Novotny’s WP Gist plugin makes it really easy to embed nice-looking, gist-specific code into a WordPress post.

Should I Learn JavaScript or jQuery First?

October 2, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

Periodically, I’m asked the question:

Should I learn JavaScript or jQuery first?

Last month, I wrote about my two favorite JavaScript books, and though I considered answering that question in the post, it seemed a bit off topic – at least that day.

So why not take the opportunity to cover it in a post of its own?

WP Comment Notes (And What We Can Learn From It)

October 1, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

About a year and a half ago, I released the first version of Single Post Message for WordPress which is a simple plugin specifically for adding a notification at the top of the bottom of a given post.

For whatever it’s worth, it’s one of the plugins I’ve enjoyed creating the most not only because it scratched my own itch, but also because it’s an extremely lean, focused plugin that aims to solve exactly one problem.

The other day, Pippin William tweeted the following:

Good plugin idea for someone: add metabox to edit screen that allows notes to be entered and displayed just above comment form for that post

— Pippin Williamson (@pippinsplugins) September 28, 2013

To which Japh Thomson replied:

@pippinsplugins Sounds like a feature request for @tommcfarlin’s “Single Post Message” plugin: http://t.co/boCu7LdmSO

— Japh (@Japh) September 29, 2013

And to which Andrew Norcross built and responded with:

https://twitter.com/norcross/status/384463729578225664

You can read the entire conversation, but there are three things that I really dig about this particular exchange and the plugin that came out of it. But before discussing those, I think its worth checking out the WP Comment Notes plugin itself.

Get a Year of Free Flywheel Hosting

September 30, 2013 / Tom

Comments on this post are now closed. Congrats to Toby and Dave - and thanks to everyone who entered the contest!

Last week, Flywheel Hosting finally exited beta and went live. For those of us who work directly with WordPress either as a designer and/or a developer, this a new a contender to the growing marketplace in WordPress-centric hosting.

I love seeing this stuff – competition fosters innovation, right?

For the next week, I’ll be running a contest here on the blog sponsored by the guys at Flywheel for some free Flywheel hosting.

Tom McFarlin