Category: Resources (Page 30 of 60)

A summary of useful links, applications, and tools that I find around the Internet.

Flatdoc For Documentation with Markdown

June 7, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

Several times, I’ve mentioned that I’m a huge fan of markdown – I use it to write emails, I dig that that’s how GitHub handles README files, I use minor variations of it in my blogging, and I’ve got a favorite app for it.

Thanks to a heads up from one of my partners, I can now write documentation with markdown.

Here’s the thing: I’ve mentioned that I’m a huge advocate for code comments – I think it’s better to go a little overboard for the sake of clarity than not, especially in open source projects.

And sure, PHP DocBlocks and tools like PHPDocumentor make it relatively easy to generate documentation, but documentation like that is best suited for other developers. It’s not exactly end-user friendly, right?

In that case, you’re talking about writing a manual.

Keka – A Free Mac File Archiver

May 31, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

Ever since November, I’ve tried to keep up a running list of the various tools and applications that I have in my development toolbox.

As of now, the list is a little out of date, which I’ll aim to update soon enough, but I recently needed a free Mac file archiver for certain purposes and stumbled across Keka (thanks to Michael for the heads up).

Generally speaking, the default Mac file archiver isn’t bad, but I use Amazon Cloud Drive as my backup solution of choice, and they only allow up to 2GBs per upload. Kinda weak, sure, but for the amount of storage that you get, it’s hard to beat the price.

So in order to handle this, I needed a way to split some of my larger files into 2GB chunks.

Enter Keka.

Gitty – GitHub For iPhone

May 30, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

As much as I love GitHub, it’s lack of mobile applications has always been kind of a bummer to me. Sure, there is GitHub Issues and it’s not bad, but it’s basically a way to keep up with issues and bugs that crop with your repositories. Personally (and surely I’m not alone), I’ve always wanted a full-featured version of GitHub for iPhone.

A couple of years a go, I met a Matthew Strickland via Twitter – he’s a solid guy, solid developer, and I’ve had the pleasure of meeting up more than a couple of times around Atlanta.

Matthew, Jared, and Myself at a recent meetup.

Recently, he released Gitty – and it solves the problem of a missing client of GitHub for iPhone. Continue reading

Learn WordPress Development with Curtis McHale

May 24, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

On this blog, I spend a significant amount of time talking about WordPress plugin development. It’s not that I dislike theme development, obviously, but I just don’t spend as much time working on them as I do plugins.

Regardless, I often receive questions that are generally “where do I learn WordPress development?” And that’s always a hard question to answer because we all have different learning styles.

To oversimplify it and distill it down into two methods, I’d say that:

Some learn best by doing
Some learn best by reading

Personally, I learn best by doing. This isn’t to say that I don’t actually read books, articles, sites, etc., but I have to put into practice what I’ve read, bang my head against the keyboard in order to decipher error messages (a common strategy, of course), and then move on to the next topic.

Not everyone is like that.

But still, the question remains: where can someone learn WordPress Development?

A Better WordPress Planet Plugin

May 24, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

Whenever you first install WordPress, one of the widgets that’s first displayed on the main page of the dashboard is the Other WordPress News widget (which actually used to be referred to as WordPress Planet). This widget has been present for as long as I can remember and is basically an aggregator of a number of different WordPress blogs.

Kinda cool, right?

If you’re someone who spends the majority of their time working in the WordPress dashboard, it’s a solid option for making sure that you don’t miss a beat of news when working with WordPress.

The thing, some have found that the feeds that populate the feed doesn’t do justice to the blogging ecosystem that exists within the WordPress blogging community. It’s not that the provided posts are bad, it’s just that they lack some of the new comers.

Enter A Better Planet.