Category: Articles (Page 131 of 258)

Personal opinions and how-to’s that I’ve written both here and as contributions to other blogs.

What Were Your Watershed Moments?

March 28, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

Watershed Moments, defined in multiple places the least of which not being Quora, is defined as:

A “watershed moment” is a point in time that marks an important, often historical change. The pertinent original usage of “watershed” is to describe a ridge of land separating waters that then flow into two different bodies.

This idea isn’t isolated to web development or software development, though since that’s the area in which many of us work I think it makes for good conversation.

This weekend, I saw my friend Justin (who, if you’re a WordPress developer, should be following) tweet out the following:

Software Developers: What are some “watershed” moments you’ve identified in your own growth?

— Justin Sainton (@JS_Zao) March 26, 2016

And each time I tried to respond using 140 characters, there wasn’t enough space (or tweets) to share my opinion on the topic (and no, this is not my advocating longer tweets ;).

But seriously, I thought it was a great question and the more I thought about it, the more I thought it might serve better as a blog post.

Do You Even Bother with a Personal Blog?

March 24, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

So here’s a short digression from the usual run-of-the-mill WordPress development post for you:

Do you maintain any type of personal blog?

The reason I ask is because, as if it isn’t evident enough, I’m kind of a fan of this whole blogging thing. But the idea of managing any type of personal blog is something that comes with a set of choices. I’ll talk more about that more in a minute.

I think it gets a little more complicated when:

You have friends and/or a following who are also online.
You have kids you want to share things about but don’t want to share photos of them because of reasons.
You care about data ownership, so you’re not willing to necessarily share the information on other publishing platforms.
And other reasons (or maybe not depending on who you are).

Yes, I have a personal blog and no I don’t really use any other social networks (though I have accounts, they are basically placeholders). Furthermore, I don’t normally promote those posts anywhere else.

I publish, and it goes into the ether than is The Google.

Part of it because I ask myself: Who cares? After all, this site is the one I write for the most and that I enjoy writing for the most.

That’s just me, though.

But I’m specifically curious how you deal with aspects mentioned above when it comes to blogging that’s not directly related to some aspect of your profession and whether or not you’d like to do it or not.

The FUD of Working with WordPress

March 23, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

If you’ve read the title of this post, then it probably comes off as no surprise. When it comes to working with WordPress, maybe it’s even obligatory for someone like me to cover.

I don’t know, but I hope that doesn’t dissuade anyone from ignoring the rest of the words in this post.

But I do know that I’ve seen a lot of other WordPress developers and those involved in the community in some regarding talking about the latest results of the Stack Overflow survey and where WordPress falls.

That is, it’s high up on the list of “most dreaded technologies.” Before I share my thoughts, there are a couple of articles (and they are quick) that are required reading before proceeding.

The reason I want you to read those two articles is because they provide some background and perspective on where I’m going with my own take regarding this topic.

Debug WordPress Projects

March 16, 2016 / Tom

I’m of the opinion that being able to debug code is one of the must-have skills of any professional developer so it stands to reason that I think if you’re working with WordPress in a professional capacity, you should be able to debug WordPress projects.

It doesn’t matter if you’re working on the server-side or the client-side; if you’re writing code, then you need to be able to:

set breakpoints,
watch variables,
step into functions,
step out of functions,
step over functions,
change values,
…and so on.

Though debuggers are common place in practically every programming environment, I recently wrote a short tutorial and filmed a short video for Envato that walks users through how to debug WordPress projects.

Escaping Strings For WordPress Database Queries

March 15, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

Escaping strings for WordPress is something that developers should be doing at any place in which the user can be sending information across the wire to the database.

Core offers some nice API functions for this. But if you’re writing a raw database query using $wpdb (which is something that I recommend only when an API doesn’t offer what’s needed), then there are still options, but you may need to fall back to a native PHP function.

Case in point: mysqli_real_escape_string.