Category: Articles (Page 214 of 258)

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

Moving Away From RSS? Subscribe By Email!

November 19, 2013 / Tom

I think that the way in which we subscribe to our favorite sites is changing – that is to say that although I think RSS is here to stay and there are some really good apps available for it, not everyone is using that particular format as much as they once did.

It’s evident that some people are now relying more on services like Twitter, Pocket, and even email digests of weekly news.

And though I considered doing that for this site (and it was split about 50/50), I ultimately decided it would be easier just give readers the option to opt-in by email.

The Paralyzing Fear of Committing To Open Source Code

November 15, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

One of the things that I think scares people off from committing to open source projects is the fear of “I don’t know where to start.”

Sure, there are other reasons as well:

“I can’t make the IRC/chat/AOL/whatever meetings.”
“I don’t understand half of what the others are talking about.”
“I only know how to work with [any given language].”
“I don’t think that I have enough experience.”
…and so on.

Honestly, you can rationalize your way out of anything that you’re afraid to do with a reason for which most people can’t fault you.

But if you’re even mildly interested in committing to an open source project – or, more specifically – helping out with WordPress, then I highly urge you do so.

Magic Quotes and PHP: Parsing Automagically Escaped Data

November 13, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

As far as building projects on or for WordPress is concerned, one of the things that we have to keep in mind is the minimum version of PHP required to run WordPress itself. And at the time of this writing, the minimum required version of 5.2.4.

Of course, if you know your project is going to run on a newer version of PHP, and you have control over that environment, then obviously you have the freedom to write code against that version; however, if you’re building something that’s going to be used across the board for any of the many hosting environments, then you’ve got to take that into consideration.

I mention this, because there have been a number of times when I’ve been working on a particular feature of a project, and I’ve had to reference the PHP manual to see if the given feature of the language is supported by the minimum current version.

Productize Your Service (or “Charge For The Work You’ve Already Done, Again.”)

November 12, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

One of the things that I often hear people talking about is whether or not they want to work on products or if they want to work on services.

Or, more specifically, they’ll ask:

Do I want to be a product company, or do I want to be a service company?

The truth is, I’ve done this myself.

I’ve had the pleasure of working with a team of other guys at 8BIT where we built Standard – a product by a product company – as well as for myself under the freshly re-branded Pressware – which is a service company.

And to be honest, I teeter back and forth between both: I enjoy working on products, and I enjoy working on services.

Each comes with their own advantages and disadvantages, and there’s a lot to be said about both, but the purpose of this post isn’t really about that.

Parsing CSV Files in PHP: Checking The File Type

November 11, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

When it comes to parsing CSV files, the way you go about doing it is relatively the same (hence the need for the standard format, right?):

Read the file
Break each line into an entry into a collection
Iterate through the collection
Create an object or element with attributes based on the data in the current given line

Sure, this is a high-level view of how it’s done, and your specific implementation may have finer nuances, but – as I mentioned – I think its safe to say that the way we go about parsing a file is the same regarding of what we do with the data once we start reading it.

When you’re working on an implementation of CSV parser and you’re accepting data from an upload, then there are several things that need to be checked such as the validity of the file type.

For example: If a person uploads an image, you don’t want to proceed with parsing it; however, if they upload an actual CSV, you obviously want to process the file.

But this can be tricky depending on the operating system.