Category: Articles (Page 163 of 258)

For a number of years, I’ve been doing screencasts that help to teach others how to use WordPress – the majority of my work has been done for Envato, but I’ve also done some one-on-one screencasting as well as some screencasting for smaller teams.

Personally, I think it’s a really invaluable way to show people how to get started with using a given project without having to have them trudge through the documentation that often ships with software or with the manual that walks users through how to do a certain task.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m all for documentation, but I also know that when you’re sitting in your chair amidst all of this frustration and you have no idea where to turn, flipping through pages and pages of content hoping to find a solution isn’t always the best feeling in the world.

Anyway, the neat thing about screencasting is that aside from being able to show people how to use a project, it can always be a means by which we use to teach other people how to learn a new skill.

To me, that’s a really cool thing.

But up until this year – in fact, up until my latest round of screencasting – I always worked hard to make sure each video was as pristine as possible.

I don’t know if that’s always such a good idea, though.

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For the last five or so years of my self-employment, a lot has changed. And I’m not talking about the technical landscape. I mean, that’s always changing, right?

But I’m talking about the way that I manage my time and the way that I get work done.

Unfortunately, the Internet has adopted this culture that allows everyone to share how they manage their time and then try to distill it into some type of step-by-step process that can be used by everyone.

That’s not the point of this post. I don’t operate that. I rarely subscribe to that advice, and I’m not going to be that guy.

Furthermore, I tend to ignore (and even reject) posts like that. We have many different personalities and so many variables that contribute to what we’re able to do, when we’re able to do it, and how we’re able to work that I don’t think it’s possible to actually distill something into a formulaic process.

Instead, I think it’s worth simply sharing ideas on what’s worked for ourselves and leaving it at that. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t some things we can borrow from others – because there is overlap in our personalities – but it also means that some of these posts are nothing more than informational pieces. And that’s fine.

So with that lengthy disclaimer out of the way, I thought I’d share some of the things that I currently do in order to manage by day-to-day tasks to get things done.

Anyway, here’s my first set of what’s to likely be more in posts that deal with confessions of a WordPress developer.

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When building solutions for others, there are certain problems that we face that – although they’ve been solved – can still be a challenge for us to deal with.

For example, you’ll often hear programmers complaining about regular expressions or maybe you’ll hear someone complaining about working with timezones.

I’ve been heads down on the latter for sometime now in a project and even with solutions like Moment.js, there are subtle nuances that must be taken into account when dealing with dates and times.

There are plenty of other examples, but the point that I’m really working towards is this:

When we’re focused on problems that have a number of subtle nuances, I think that we often tend to overlook some of the simpler things that can be done to address the issue.

In my case, I’ve been in the trenches with timezones, offsets, and other subtleties that come with working with dates and times that I’ve tried to over-solve a problem.

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