Category: Articles (Page 197 of 258)

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

Reinventing the Wheel Is Okay (The How and Why of Programming)

May 12, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

For those of you who are into development or programming of any type and if you read any type of blogs or long form articles that provide tutorials for how to achieve a certain type of task, then you’ve no doubt seen comments that say something along the lines of:

Or you could just use [this library] to solve the problem rather than writing it yourself.

Or maybe you’ll see something like:

There’s no need to do anything like this because XYZ solution already does it.

And it’s not that those types of statements aren’t true or even useful resources, but given in the improper context, I think they can seriously put a damper on the motivation people have for writing tutorials and/or reading tutorials because they tend to say that there’s no point in understanding how to do it in a given way when something else already does it.

It’s as if everything is reduced to reinventing the wheel – but it’s not.

Reinventing The Wheel

For those of us who are genuinely interested in programming, isn’t part of the reason that we got into the field was not only to build things, but because we have an insatiable curiosity for how things work?

Marked as Read Because of Lack of Time?

May 10, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

I rarely – if ever – write on Saturday, but this is something short and sweet so it seems to be okay. One of the aspects of this site is that I end to write articles that vary between 700 – 1000 words (not including code).

With as much information as we’re inundated with on a daily basis, I can’t help but wonder if some of those posts are being lost in the shuffle, marked as read because of the lack of time people have (and believe me, I know we all have a lack of time), or if it’s too much to digest each day of the week.

I know that a lot of people are against the daily blogging thing, a lot of people are for it, and that’s fine with me – we’ve got our opinions and our preferences to which we’re all entitled, and we have the ability to choose what we want to read, what we don’t want to read, and when we want to read it.

To that end, the schedule at which a person blogs has never been an issue for me; however, personally, I’ve noticed that longer form articles can be a bit of a time sink when I want to read them, but don’t have the ability to do so.

So I’ve got a question for those who are willing to give some honest feedback.

Isolating Styles When Creating a Theme-Specific Plugin

May 7, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

This is probably the most unique way that I’ve started a post since I’ve been writing here, but given the fact that my family continues to grow every couple of years or so, I figure that it stands to reason that the forthcoming example would be inevitable.

This past weekend, I was doing the usual routine of unboxing, ahem, diapers, refilling the wipe container and so on.

I told you this was going to start off weird.

There’s nothing spectacular or unique about what you see above, except for the fact that Huggies makes both the container and the wipes that fit within the container.

But here’s the neat thing: when you purchase the wipes made by the vendor of the container, they provide a separator to let you know exactly how many to get out to fill the container.

The divider separates how many wipes fit in the container.

I hesitate to say that this is kind of “neat” because, y’know, we’re talking about diapers. Additionally, we can technically buy any wipes and/or any container just so long as the wipes stay fresh, right?

But when you purchase both of the products from the same vendor, then there’s this small bonus that you get in terms of grabbing the exact amount of wipes you need for the container. Obviously, the two were made for one another.

So, naturally, I made the leap into thinking about WordPress themes, WordPress plugins, and theme-specific plugins.

It’s what anyone would logically do, right?

Data Models in WordPress – Their Perspective, Not Ours

May 6, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

When it comes to treating WordPress as a web application foundation (and I dislike the use of the word framework, because that’s not what it is), one of things that I think that we, as developers, need to do a better job of doing is to introducing features that more conceptually map to the model of the data we are tasked with introducing for our users.

Sure, it’s one thing to introduce domain language into the solution that we’re building for our users, but there are greater strides that we can make in terms of introducing features and components that do a better job of mapping to the user’s problem.

Organizing WordPress Content Types and Libraries

May 5, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

Last week, I shared a post on how I go about organizing my WordPress theme functions.

Generally speaking, the conversation that ensued in the comments was more interesting the post itself (at least as far as I’m concerned :) because it raised some interesting points of how others organize their files, as well as raised questions as to some strategies for organizing other types of files.

Specifically, Mike said:

I did the same thing recently with the /inc/ folder and needing to add a bunch of different loop files for post types, wondering if I should add a folder within the /inc/ to separate the loop files from the other files I needed. I think I may have been over complicating things a bit, too.

I thought it was a good comment and my answer is a bit longer than a normal comment, so I thought I’d draft a post about it not only to share my thoughts, but also to allow others to chime in, as well.

After all, half the reason I end up thinking through some of the things that I do comes from opinions shared in the comment stream, in related Tweets, and so on.