Category: Articles (Page 239 of 258)

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

My Day-To-Day: Managing Social Media

March 5, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

Last week, I wrote about my first Day-To-Day post on Getting Things Done. In the comments, Kevin asked the following question:

Tom, do you schedule time to use Twitter and general interneting or are you able to work with intermittent distractions?

The truth is, I was actually going to include this in the original post, but it was getting a bit long so I thought it made more sense to break it out into a separate post.

TL;DR: I don’t use a Twitter client on my phone, I check in a few times a day, I generally don’t use Facebook, and I use Path for my closest friends and family.

Of course, there’s a bit more to it than that.

Some Thoughts on Building WordPress Plugins

March 4, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

With the exception of Standard and contract projects, I generally don’t build WordPress themes for release.

I tend to favor plugins because I’m attracted to the functionality that they are able to introduce to the core WordPress application and, frankly, I don’t have the design chops required to produce a theme of high enough quality.

Simply put, I try to focus on what I’m good at doing so others can do the same.

Last week, I talked about the problem of offering support for free WordPress plugins, the challenges that I’m currently facing, and ultimately what I’m aiming to do about it.

So in keeping consistent with trying to share my general thought process on both plugin development and moving to a better business model, I thought I’d also share some thoughts on building WordPress plugins. Continue reading

Incorporating The jQuery Date Picker in WordPress

How To Include The jQuery Datepicker in WordPress

February 28, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

In the first quarter of this year, I’ve been working on two client projects both of which have called specifically for incorporating advanced date management into various aspects of WordPress.

Because of various formats, user error, and so on can make working with dates a bit difficult, I’ve always been partial to working with date pickers to make date selection and management a bit easier.

And since WordPress includes both jQuery and jQuery UI, I tend to use the features that are included rather than introducing yet-another-library.

In my latest series on WPTuts+, I walk through the process of how to incorporating the jQuery datepicker in WordPress.

My Day-To-Day: Getting Things Done

February 27, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

For me, Twitter’s utility has changed a bit over the last few years. What once was used as a way for my friends and I to share what we were up to, where we were, and so on has more or less morphed into a way for me to chat with other people who share similar interests regardless of where we are.

In fact, I’ve seen that each of my friends use Twitter in their own respective ways.

For people that I know personally, Path – yep, I actually use it – has worked out pretty well. But I’ve met a lot of really cool, interesting, and smart people on Twitter that I interact with on a daily basis many of which I would’ve never met otherwise.

Case in point: Jason Resnick is a fellow developer and tweep that I’ve known for a little over a year via Twitter. Yesterday, he asked me this question:

https://twitter.com/rezzz/status/306412898425651200

This isn’t the first time that I’ve been asked this question, and although this isn’t strictly related to development, I figure that it’s close enough to how I actually get development done that I’d share my response here.

Support Doesn’t Scale (or “Avoid Free WordPress Support”)

February 26, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

Recently, I’ve been talking quite a bit about profiting from open source software, strategies for supporting WordPress plugins, and debating just how much to support to offer.

To say that I’ve been exploring business models and support offerings for my plugins would be a bit of an understatement. Clearly, this has been something that’s been on my mind for the last few months.

The thing is, this won’t be the first time that I’ve ventured into this territory. In fact, I’ve done this for two plugins – WP Social Icons and Author Admin – that I retired some time ago. Ultimately, I want to make sure that if I do this again, I do this right.

But while I’m still working on the logistics of everything, I thought it’d be worth sharing why I’m even doing this.

Quite simply: Support doesn’t scale.