Category: Articles (Page 144 of 258)

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

When Clients Disappear Without Paying

October 21, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

When starting a business, there’s a lot of things to think about. For example:

The idea of working for yourself is exciting
The challenges of managing your own retirement can be tough
Navigating the tax code can be tougher (get a CPA!)
Keeping your own books can be tedious
Working with clients can be a lot of fun, but also tough
…and so on.

A lot of it is exciting, some of it is scary, and some of the it you might expect but don’t really know how to handle until it actually happens.

Case in point:

When working with a client, what do you do when you’ve completed a project, they disappear, and they don’t pay the final invoice?

This is when self-employment gets a little tougher.

What We Publish is Our Legacy

October 20, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

A few weeks ago, the WordPress community (and the world) lost an amazing person: Alex King. You can read much more about who he was as well as a round-up of tweets and posts all about him on WP Tavern.

Our Legacy

I’m not a fan of trying to summarize a person’s life in a quote or a sentence so I won’t be doing that. Instead, I wanted to highlight that Alex did something that’s been on my mind ever since I first read the post:

One of the things my wife and I are trying to do is put together some information about my career that will hopefully give my 6 year-old daughter a better sense of who I was as an adult. She knows me as “dad”, but when she gets older she’ll be curious about who I was to my peers and colleagues.

Take the time to read the entire post and its feedback, as well.

Whenever we lose people that have made a significant impact on our lives, be it directly or indirectly, it can be a challenge to process it. I don’t think it gets any easier nor do I believe it’s supposed to, either.

With that said, I’ve been thinking about how so many of us are sharing content via our blogs and how this may impact the legacy we leave behind.

In short, what we publish can be come part of our legacy.

Keeping Separate Files for Ajax in WordPress

October 15, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

When working with Ajax in WordPress, the general setup is pretty straightforward:

Register the `ajaxurl`, if needed
Define the hooks (or the callbacks) on the server-side
Register and Enqueue the JavaScript files
Have your JavaScript file(s) call to the defined server-side hooks
Update the front-end as necessary

And the front-end may refer to the Dashboard, the public-facing part of the blog, or the both. It depends on the nature of what you’re working on.

If you’ve worked with Ajax in WordPress in-depth for any amount of time, then you’re likely familiar with the above process. You’re also familiar with the challenges of maintenance depending on how the code was setup.

If you’re just getting started, then perhaps this post will help shortcut some of the learning the rest of us have had to do.

I don’t think the Ajax APIs are that bad. I know – this is subjective. But from the a maintenance standpoint I believe that there’s at least one thing we can do to make development and maintenance easier.

Showing Poor Source Code

October 13, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

The act of showing poor source code either via our blogs or our open repositories can be a scary thing. I mean, we’re putting out for others to read and critique that we’ve worked hard to complete.

Sometimes we do it thinking that we’re on the right track; sometimes we do it when we’re asking for it.

Writing

In the latter case, I’d say that it’s not so scary – we’re asking for critique. In the former, isn’t it a bit more challenging when we get that criticism?

That is, isn’t it harder to deal with the criticism that comes on to something we thought we were doing right?

Of course. Does that mean we should stop sharing our code? No way.

Tips For Daily Blogging (And How To Garner Blog Post Ideas)

October 12, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

Like anyone who blogs are regular intervals, be it a few times a week to daily, I’m asked how I write daily. In short, I wish I had a simple recipe to explain how to do it.

But I think this is something unique to every person.

Sure, I think people should write daily even if they aren’t publishing their content on a blog. I believe something happens when you articulate your thoughts via the written word.

You become better at thinking through some of your own opinions.
You get better at presenting ideas to other people even if they will result in a debate.
You reason through your own convictions for why you feel the way you do about a given topic.

Sure, this sounds a little silly when talking about writing about development. It’s not, though.

Our field is one that’s built on the idea of logic and having things work in a logical and efficient manner. It’s important to make sure that our reasons for why we do the things we do have been reasons through, as well.

But I’ll talk more on that in a moment.

Instead, back to the original question: How does one get into the habit of daily blogging?