Category: Articles (Page 28 of 258)

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

Privacy is Hard: Analytics, Revisited

March 4, 2020 / Tom

In a previous post, I talked a bit about Fathom Analytics and what a fan I was of the service when it first launched.

Now that a few months have passed and the product has further evolved, I wanted to revisit the service and share a few things that I like about it.

Privacy is Hard: Web Browsing with 1Blocker

January 16, 2020 / Tom

When it comes to privacy and web browsing, I’ve talked Firefox in a previous post. In the same post, I also stated:

I’m actually a fan of Safari for casually browsing the web. That browser coupled with 1Blocker makes it a solid alternative.

As far as Firefox is concerned, I still think it’s a fantastic browser but if you’re looking for a seamless experience between macOS and iOS 1Blocker alternative solution that I’ve been using for a few weeks.

The motivation for privacy (which I’ve previously shared) still stands but it may not be the same for you. I’m approaching it with the following attitude:

what I’m comfortable with using may not be the same for you (and vice versa),
and privacy and security are not terms that I use interchangeably.

That said, the rationale for using software like this alongside a browser that’s bundled with an operating system (remember when that was a big deal?) rather than a third-party browser is different.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays (For 2019)

December 25, 2019 / Tom

Every year, I try to take the time off from Christmas to New Year’s to be with family and friends and this year is no different.

During my time off, I’ve spent a bunch of time with my family, seen Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (and it was great to share the experience with my kids to see the movie on the big screen!), and already spent some time with my in-laws to celebrate the holiday.

Deactivating WordPress Plugins with SQL

December 12, 2019 / Tom

If you inherit a WordPress codebase, regardless of the age of the project, there may be a lot of context that you don’t have as to why certain decisions were made or how things were implemented.

This may include the server, infrastructure used to help power the site or the app, and other contextual information about the environment in which it was running.

This type of information can be server-related information, PHP version, database type, information that’s actually stored in the database especially if you do a database import, and so on.

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Ideally, all of this is handed over but that’s not always the case. Anyway, say you attempt to start it up and then when you attempt to start up the application, not only does it not work but it either shows a white screen or displays a message about technical problems with your installation.

How To Fix the Referenced PHPCompatibility Sniff Error

December 5, 2019 / Tom

There are a lot of nice packages that we can use in our PHP-based projects and if you’re using Composer or GrumPHP, PHPCompatibility is one that I recommend including your projects especially if you’re writing code for something that’s going to run across multiple versions of PHP (that is, on hosts that offer different versions).

This is a set of sniffs for PHP CodeSniffer that checks for PHP cross-version compatibility. It will allow you to analyse your code for compatibility with higher and lower versions of PHP.
PHPCompatibility Repository

This is something that be installed within composer and it’s something that I recommend for people writing code for WordPress because of how much variation exists within our hosts.

Occasionally, though, you may see a problem like this:

And if you run $ phpcs -i you may get a message that’s unclear.