Category: Articles (Page 230 of 258)

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

How To Easily Filter Names in jQuery

June 13, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

If you're an advanced developer or just want the TL;DR version of this, skip to the code.

One of the more common UI design patterns is to render a table of data that includes rows that include people’s names, various information about them, and so on.

Usually, there are some type of control elements that allow you to filter the data by some type of criteria. Obviously, this is especially useful with large datasets where you don’t want to page through pages of data or scroll for a significantly long length of time.

Though there are a variety of ways to filter data – especially if you want to do so through the use of different values – one way that’s most common is to filter data by a person’s name.

If the data set is really large, this is often something that’s best left to process on the server side; however, if the data set is modest, it’s really easy to filter names in jQuery.

Functions.php vs Plugin, Who Wins?

June 11, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

When it comes to introducing custom functionality into a WordPress project, the debate between functions.php vs. plugin usage is nothing new.

Generally speaking, I think of themes are presentation and plugins as functionality that transcend whatever theme or themes with which they’re installed.

But sometimes, this delineation isn’t so clear. For example, let’s say that you’re working on a theme that needs to introduce a custom meta box – or several – into the post editor screen.

Though this is presentation related in that it will impact what’s displayed to the users, it’s also a bit of custom functionality but it’s only relegated to this particular theme.

What then?

Tell Me: What Have You Done?

June 10, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

When it comes to building, launching, and maintaining your own projects – be it software, hardware, blogs, sites, songs, paintings, …, anything, etc. – one of the things that you have to be prepared for is the amount of criticism to which you’re opening yourself up.

Granted, you have to take the good with the bad, but the problem with the bad is that it’s so much easier to take to heart and/or focus on that the good, right?

But the irony in this is that not only do we subject ourselves to said criticism, but some also offer criticism to what others have done.

If you’re on the receiving end of said criticism, it’s easy to get defensive; if you’re on the giving end of the criticism, it’s easy to mask it as constructive when, in fact, it may not be at all.

So how do we deal with this kind of stuff on a day-to-day basis?

Don’t Copy WordPress Plugins

June 6, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

The conversation about the ethics of what it means to copy WordPress plugins, theme, applications, and more isn’t new. In fact, just the other day, I was having a conversation with a friend of mine about what competition looks like in various marketplaces.

Based on my conversation with him (and a number of others, for what it’s worth), there tends to be two schools of thought on releasing products into a marketplace that can be summed up in the following two statements:

If a similar product already exists, don’t do it.
If a similar product already exists, do it.

Sure, that’s an oversimplification of the idea and there’s a lot to be said about both; however, I’ve seen this same thing discussed in the context of both WordPress theme and plugin development.

Specifically, the quote I read was as follows:

1. Check the plugin repository to see if similar plugin exists.

2. If so, don’t reinvent the wheel.

Initially, I categorically disagreed with this perspective. Continue reading

The Tension of Writing on Medium

June 5, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

Of all of the various blogging and/or digital publishing platforms that are available, the one that has intrigued me the most has been Medium.

Last night, I received an invite (though I’ve yet to write my first post), but there are already points of tension that I feel when it comes to writing on Medium.

Before I actually get into that, I actually really dig what they are doing with comments, authenticating with Twitter (one less login!), collections, and so on.

But here’s the thing: I feel as if the service looks so good that it invites only the best content that I – or anyone – can write before actually hitting publish.

There’s a lot wrapped up in that.