Category: Articles (Page 223 of 255)

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

My Day To Day: Using Hangouts For iPhone

July 26, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

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.

Shipping Software in WordPress (Why Perfection is Unattainable)

July 25, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

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.

My Experience with OAuth.io

July 24, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

A couple of weeks ago, a new service – OAuth.io – was announced that claimed it was going to make it much easier to work with a variety of providers who offer OAuth for their authentication mechanism.

During the announcements, they were doing the usual and taking emails for beta invites. I went ahead and registered – 8BIT had a small project in the pipeline that would be perfect for this should the time sync up for it – and looked forward to trying it out.

To be fair, I rarely get my hopes up with online services. They frequently over promise, under deliver, and are then bought out or eventually sold.

But hey, it was free, it was new, it sounded good, so why not, right?

Now that I’ve actually put it to work in a real world project, I thought I’d share my thoughts on it.

Why Themes Are Presentation, Plugins Are Applications

July 23, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

I recently had a conversation with someone about why I tend to favor working on WordPress plugins over working with themes, and the short answer is that I enjoy working more on application-type functionality rather than working on a design layer, and, as such, I believe plugins are applications for WordPress.

I’ve talked a little bit about this in previous articles:

In short, I tend to strictly view themes as the presentation of data whereas I see plugins as something that should transcend themes and offer functionality to WordPress regardless of what the current blog looks like. This isn’t a revolutionary Idea. Most experienced WordPress developers and designers feel this way, but I figured I’d offer my two cents on the subject.

In a way, plugins are like apps for WordPress.

The Signal and Noise of Developer Maturity

July 22, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

I think that for many developers, it’s all too common for them to have heard or even to have said something along the lines: “That’s nice, but I could build that, too” or perhaps go even further and then say “that’s nice, but I could build it better.”

In fact, years ago, the classical example of this was:

I could’ve written Twitter in a weekend.

Surely some of you guys remember that.

Anyway, there’s another thing that’s interesting in the development community and that’s that we’re all taking advantage of the work of others who have come before us.

To use a cliche, we’re standing on the shoulders of giants.

And what I’m getting at has nothing to do with whether or not you could’ve written Twitter in a weekend, but that there are certain signals of developer maturity, and one of the first is recognizing that regardless of whether or not you know when to write it from the ground up, and when you know when to use the work of others.