Category: Articles (Page 227 of 258)

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

The High Price of Free Plugins

July 16, 2013 / Tom

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Recently, I had a chance to guest post over at WP Explorer and opted to discuss the high price of free WordPress plugins.

For the most part, the article is aimed at anyone who is looking to get into WordPress plugin development, but isn’t quite sure what to expect. Honestly, it’s one of those “if I knew then what I knew now” kind of scenarios.

Ultimately, I cover a handful of topics – both pros and cons – about what to expect when getting into the game.

Whatever You Do: Keep Calm and Code On

July 15, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

A couple of weeks ago, I shared an very simple open source plugin for WordPress called Markdown Code For WordPress.

The purpose of the plugin is simple:

I include a variety of snippets in my posts for which I get tired of adding markup every. single. time.

Over time, I’ve added support for just a few more tokens, but the bottom line is that the plugin is written to help make what I do just a little bit easier in my day-to-day.

If others find it useful, great! If not, no big deal, either. It’s available for free and I’ll even take a look at pull requests to see if it fits in the vision for what I want.

On Missions and Visions: Your Brand, Your Company, Yourself

July 13, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

With my recent sharing of my upcoming rebrand and the sharing of some of the things like premium plugins and my choice of support software, I’ve also been giving thoughts to things like mission statements, vision statements, and more.

Truth be told, I’ve almost always considered that kind of stuff to be related more to larger companies or organizations.

But why?

Why is it not applicable to a freelancer, a small team or a small business?

My Third Post on Medium: On Music and Millennials

July 11, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

When it comes to maintaining this site, one of the things that I try to do is stay “on topic.” Looking back through the posts, you see that there are actually very few things that I discuss that aren’t on the topic of development in some capacity.

For what it’s worth, I think having extreme focus on a blog is important. Spreading out too wide dilutes content and leaves you with a mixed-to-no audience.

And that’s why I hesitate sharing some of the stuff like this.

But you know, I’ve always enjoyed seeing what some of my fellow developers are writing and sharing outside of their typical stuff, so I always assume that a post like that now and again doesn’t hurt.

So as I’ve continued to explore Medium and what they’re doing with the service, I wrote a post earlier this week all about music and millennials.

Your WordPress Plugin Idea – What’s The Point?

July 11, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

When it comes to coming up with WordPress plugin ideas (or themes or general applications on any platform, for that matter), we all have different ways of going about doing it.

Some of us do it by scratching our own itch, some of us do it by modifying or adjusting an existing project to meet our needs, some of us dream up a random idea, and some of us do all of the above.

But coming up with an idea for a project is only half of it – you’ve also got to determine if your project serves a particular purpose, solves a particular problem, or has a particular use case.

I mean, very few things in this world are created “just because,” right?