Category: Articles (Page 144 of 258)

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

Two Reasons For a Changelog

October 23, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

You’ve likely often heard of programmers talking about change logs. Whether you’ve heard good things depends upon the developers with whom you’ve interacted.

At least keep track of it somewhere.

Sometimes, I think we get a little exhausted writing change logs. This ends up manifesting itself in half-baked commit messages or in lack of a changelog.

But if you’re a programmer responsible for leading a project be it as a freelancer or as part of a team, the importance of a changelog should not missed.

Debugging Minified Files in WordPress

October 22, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

As much as I’m a proponent of concatenating and minifying dependencies, it’s not without challenges. Sure, this is includes both stylesheets and JavaScript, but I’m specifically talking about debugging minified files in WordPress.

A minified bug. Get it?

It’s one thing to have your JavaScript files separated and organized in your Development. But when it’s time to deploy to Production, you should be aiming for a few minified files.

For example, say a client contacts you claiming something on their site isn’t working? You load up the site, you check the browser console and see there’s an error in the JavaScript.

Wait. You’ve minified all the files.

So what now?

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.