Software Engineering in WordPress, PHP, and Backend Development

Category: Articles (Page 222 of 255)

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

Blogging Myths: Perfection, Focus, and Experiments

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As someone who clearly loves to blog (as well as read what others have to say and build things for others to use), one of the things that I enjoy the most is hearing from others – specifically, family and friends – who want to get into blogging but aren’t sure where to start.

Blogging is a lot like Loch Ness: It’s a deep and wide sea that’s full of myths that can detract you from the actual site if you’re not careful.

Nessie isn't a myth. She's real. Okay? Okay.

Nessie isn’t a myth. She’s real. Okay? Okay.

Cheesy example, I know, but the truth is that there are several blogging myths all of which can seriously keep people at bay from pressing the publish button, and that’s a real shame especially if it’s an interest that they have.

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Unicode Characters, Regular Expressions, JavaScript, and WordPress

For those who have been into computer science for any amount of time, you’re likely familiar with Joel Spolsky, his blog Joel on Software, and/or perhaps any of his books.

A couple of years ago, I read an article called The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!).

I’m not ashamed to admit that, at the time, it wasn’t very applicable to me. Yes, it was interesting, yes, I cared, but I didn’t have a practical way to implement it simply because there was nothing that I was working that warranted the information in the article.

But here was one of my biggest takeaways:

If you completely forget everything I just explained, please remember one extremely important fact. It does not make sense to have a string without knowing what encoding it uses. You can no longer stick your head in the sand and pretend that “plain” text is ASCII.

Fast forward a couple of years and I was working at a place where every piece of application code that we rolled out had to be internationalized because it was accessible by a variety of countries all across the world – now it was more practical (and it’s not much different than WordPress, huh?).

And now, I’m finding myself working more with unicode characters in WordPress more than I ever have before.

Here’s the thing that few people talk about: Sites, themes, or HTML in general will specify a character set that can drastically affect how the content in your page is rendered.

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A Few Thoughts on WordPress Affiliate Programs

A few months ago, a number of companies – ours included – began to suspend or completely end their WordPress affiliate programs.

Naturally, this created a bit of a backlash.

In all fairness, not all customers were particularly upset. Some were disappointed, sure, and rightly so but moved on with their blogs; others were far more upset about the apparent injustice that was served by companies opting to pull the plugin on the program.

Since news in WordPress opts to ebb and flow week to week, this has been something that’s passed, but I’ve begun to see some comments beginning to crop up again specifically around affiliate programs in the WordPress space.

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My Day To Day: Using Hangouts For iPhone

One of the things I like the most about using Apple devices is iMessages (or Messages as they’re called now, I believe).

Being able to keep threads of texts going regardless of the device that I’m on has become somewhat of a luxury that I really didn’t notice until I began keeping up texts with family members who are on Androids.

To be honest, I don’t know how long the application was out prior to when I started using, but I’ve ended up using Hangouts For iPhone and it’s solved the problem of keeping up with texts with family and friends on Android while also being able to continue conversations from my computer.

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Shipping Software in WordPress (Why Perfection is Unattainable)

One of the blogs that I enjoy following – much like most developers, designers, and techies – is the 37signals blog.

Generally speaking, it’s a great blog to read if you’re into following a company’s philosophy and process, but one of the guys – Nick – shared a great post the other day that struck a chord with me personally as it relates to shipping software especially in the WordPress economy:

Shipping beats perfection.
Be open. Share your work.
Anybody can fix anything.

– Khan Academy’s development mantras are stunningly simple and powerful.

Good stuff, right?

But how exactly does this apply to me (or even others) in the digital publishing space.

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