Category: Articles (Page 167 of 258)

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

Pressware Needs an Intern (Want to Work on Some Projects With Me?)

February 16, 2015 / Tom

For those of you who have followed this blog for sometime, you’re likely aware that I make a living building solutions for others using WordPress – all of this is done under my company, Pressware.

From the landing page, you’ll notice that there are two other team members – Stephen and Nathaniel – both of whom are responsible for other tasks on the team (and we’re even shifting roles a little bit more very soon, but that’s beside the point).

Though I’ve almost always done exclusively project-based work, I’m also looking into branching out into products, as well. I doubt this is a surprise. The thing is, in order to help expand the business into both products and services, I need a little bit of help in growing the business.

To that end, I’m looking for an intern.

Am I Giving To WordPress?

February 12, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

Yesterday, I stumbled across tweet from a fellow developer for whom I greatly respect. He said:

https://twitter.com/johnpbloch/status/565399105544126464

Which naturally got me a little bit introspective wondering ifI have been giving to WordPress as much as I should.

From WooThemes: The Importance of Focus

February 11, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

Early last week, WooThemes announced that they were shutting down their Twitter support channel. You can read the entire post here, but there were a few quotes in the article that I really liked.

WooThemes Support

First:

And a lot to say. And that pretty quickly, questions get technical and DMs and 140 characters are not ideal facilitators of such things.

Secondly:

Everyone with a smart phone has a soap box.

With our users being of the techie variety most are on Twitter and it’s a space where we frequently get questions about products, potluck inquiries, reports of glitches, panicked alerts about problems, shout-outs, suggestions et al. It’s a mixed bag!

And finally:

But after letting @WooSupport run for a while realised what it was actually doing was creating an expectation that we never intended to meet which was that we were able to actually give support over Twitter.

The article also goes on to discuss interesting things such as how support requests are unique, individual problems are unique, and managing support via Twitter versus a dedicated ticket (like in ZenDesk) can be problematic.

Props to them for doing this.

You Know The Least About a Project…

February 10, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

Of the developers I know and respect (or who are worth their weight in gold code) have often expressed this negative feeling that occurs at the end of the project.

You know: The one where you feel like the code could be better, the architecture could be better, the feeling that there’s so much room for refactoring, and so on and on it goes.

It’s practically the total opposite of when a project starts. That is, you set out with this clear goal in mind of what you want to achieve and are excited by the prospect of building this pristine system that’s going to be a work of art – it’ll be some of the best code that you’ve ever written.

Until it’s not.

The FUD of WordPress Competition

February 6, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

If you hang around WordPress long enough – or arguably any community long enough – then you’re likely to see certain conversations show up again and again.

Right now, it’s undeniable that WordPress has massive marketshare and that it’s doing a good job of maintaining that; however, there’s questions as to whether or not WordPress can grow beyond what it currently has.

This is true for a variety of reasons the least of which isn’t the fact that there are other new content management systems cropping up much more frequently than others.

This makes us nervous. Conversations start, blog posts go up (I guess this one is included, I dunno – I tend to take a different approach), and then FUD begins to fuel more of the conversation.

But I think that’s the problem: We forgo where we’ve been, where are, and where we can head, then we look to our and left and our right and feel like we’re doing something less superior.

What’s that all about?