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Keka – A Free Mac File Archiver

May 31, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

Ever since November, I’ve tried to keep up a running list of the various tools and applications that I have in my development toolbox.

As of now, the list is a little out of date, which I’ll aim to update soon enough, but I recently needed a free Mac file archiver for certain purposes and stumbled across Keka (thanks to Michael for the heads up).

Generally speaking, the default Mac file archiver isn’t bad, but I use Amazon Cloud Drive as my backup solution of choice, and they only allow up to 2GBs per upload. Kinda weak, sure, but for the amount of storage that you get, it’s hard to beat the price.

So in order to handle this, I needed a way to split some of my larger files into 2GB chunks.

Enter Keka.

Gitty – GitHub For iPhone

May 30, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

As much as I love GitHub, it’s lack of mobile applications has always been kind of a bummer to me. Sure, there is GitHub Issues and it’s not bad, but it’s basically a way to keep up with issues and bugs that crop with your repositories. Personally (and surely I’m not alone), I’ve always wanted a full-featured version of GitHub for iPhone.

A couple of years a go, I met a Matthew Strickland via Twitter – he’s a solid guy, solid developer, and I’ve had the pleasure of meeting up more than a couple of times around Atlanta.

Matthew, Jared, and Myself at a recent meetup.

Recently, he released Gitty – and it solves the problem of a missing client of GitHub for iPhone. Continue reading

“You’ve Got Too Many Irons in The Fire”

May 29, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

As far as this blog is concerned, I rarely share anything personal. That is, I rarely share anything outside of WordPress and/or general development practices, but the thing is, when you make your living off of just that, it’s hard for it not to intersect with your personal life in some capacity.

When I was in high school, I remember feeling especially stressed out about a number of different things that I had going on all at once. At the time, it seemed like a big deal. I remember talking with my parents about it and my dad specifically saying:

You’ve got too many irons in the fire.

Though I knew he was right, I still laughed a little bit because that’s the kind of wisdom that, as a teenager, you expect to come from your parents, right? Plus, the implication is that you have to remove some of the said irons and I wasn’t going to do that (again, because I of the whole stubborn teenager thing).

But here I am over 10 years later with that phrase going through my head again.

And again.

Too Many Irons in The Fire

Though this isn’t true of all, I’d venture to say that most people are busy – busy with jobs, busy with significant others, busy with exercising, busy with traveling, etc.

We’ve all got stuff going on. The only thing is that we have different stuff going on – and one person’s level of busyness is hard to compare to another person’s level of busyness because they’re two different types of activities so the whole I’m-busier-than-you-are-and-you-don’t-understand mentality is pointless.

So anyway, one of the things that I absolutely love about balancing my time between self-employment and working at building a company is that I get to work on a lot of really fun stuff with some really amazing people (and great friends).

On top of that, I have the opportunity to speak at some really cool events, contribute to a variety of different blogs, and I have the ability to watch all of the little characteristics and personality traits develop in my 16 month old.

But the challenge of balancing all of this is that you eventually find yourself having to juggle too much or, to use the same idiom, manage too many irons in the fire.

If you want to continue working on the things that you love with the people who are worth surrounding yourself with all the while being fully present as a husband and a father, then something has to go.

As I mentioned earlier in the post: the implication if the idiom is that have to remove some of those said irons.

And that’s no easy task.

More Development – Domain For Sale

May 28, 2013 / Tom

TL;DR: I am looking to sell a previous domain: MoreDevelopment.com

When I first went self-employed, my goal was simple: to build sites and software for small businesses, teams, and individuals.

To that end, I ended up using a variety of different platforms, languages, and tools in order to best serve whatever the primary need was.

But over the past year or so, I’ve begun to heavily focus specifically on WordPress. So much so that I’m currently doing 100% of my contract work building applications on WordPress, creating custom plugins (both for fun and profit), speaking at events, guest blogging, building themes, and so on and I’m really enjoying it.

As such, I’ve made the decision to deliberately focus specifically on WordPress for the foreseeable future and, as such, am working on rebranding my company as well as all the peripheral stuff that comes with doing that.

Additionally, I need to sell of an old domain.

The WordPress Register Activation Hook

May 28, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

For those of you who have been following development of the WordPress Plugin Boilerplate, you’ll recall that I previously included the `register_activation_hook` and `register_deactivation_hook` calls within the the class itself.

In the latest version of the Boilerplate, they’ve been removed outside of the context of the class and into a separate file. Last week, I received a great comment asking why this decision was made:

I have this one question – why plugin activation/deactivation hooks are registered outside the constructor (as they were in v1.0) ?

I thought it would be better to discuss the decision in a blog post rather than in a lengthy comment.