Blog
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Stop Avoiding Regular Expressions Damn It
May 12th, 2013 at 9:42am | 14 CommentsIf you develop in Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Javascript (or pretty much any other language with its roots in Unix) and don’t know regular expressions, you are missing a critical piece. And if you’re intentionally avoiding regular expressions, it’s like you’ve torn pages out of YOUR manual, but everyone else’s manual is complete. read more »
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Why Firefox DevTools?
March 19th, 2013 at 10:46am | 4 CommentsAlex Limi (from Mozilla) published an excellent post yesterday assessing the current settings control panel in Firefox. Many of the options are unused by 99% of users and some even break the browsing experience. Alex argues that if these settings are not for the vast majority of users, they don’t belong in the control panel. ... read more »
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The Best Time to Buy is Now
February 4th, 2013 at 1:49pm | 1 CommentMy first WP Daily guest post was just published. Here’s a taste: Last year, I bought a sofa for my office from Costco. It went on sale two weeks later for $500 off. I called Costco and they refunded the $500. No questions asked. The thing is, I knew there was a good chance the sofa would ... read more »
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Extending WP_Query
December 16th, 2012 at 12:46pm | 6 CommentsI’ve had the pleasure of contributing a couple of WordPress (WP) snippets to Elliot Richmond’s WP Snippets Til Christmas advent calendar this holiday season. Today’s snippet happens to be one of my contributions and I’d like to expand on it a bit more here. read more »
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Commercial WordPress Plugins
November 19th, 2012 at 9:00am | 1 CommentAs promised, I’m responding to Matt’s comments at PressNomics on selling WordPress (WP) plugins and laying out my philosophy and beliefs on the subject. Commercial plugins help or hurt WP? I’m summarizing, but during his interview, Matt essentially said that designs have more value in being rare, charging for them makes them rarer, so it ... read more »
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PressNomics Conference Recap
November 15th, 2012 at 2:33pm | 2 CommentsPressNomics was the best conference I’ve ever attended. Held last week in Phoenix, it was the inaugural conference for those in the business of WordPress (WP). Previous to this, Web Directions North had been my favourite conference. So why did PressNomics take the top spot? I’m passionate about building web-based product businesses. Most conferences I’ve ... read more »
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Custom Table for WordPress Custom Fields
November 1st, 2012 at 10:22am | 5 CommentsI just read Tom McFarlin’s thoughts on building web apps with WP and my comment started to run long, so here I am, writing a blog post. I agree with Tom, WP can make a great foundation for an app. I chose to use WP when I started building WP App Store and it gave me a ... read more »
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WordPress Best Practices: Global functions vs. classes
May 25th, 2012 at 11:21am | 2 CommentsA couple of months ago I started a thread on the wp-hackers mailing list. I wanted to know whether the WP’s core team intended to use PHP classes or sets of global functions with global variables going forward. I prize consistency above all else in my coding and wanted to follow their lead. Here’s what I posted: ... read more »
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Dandelion: Git Deployment over FTP
May 4th, 2012 at 3:10pm | No CommentsDandelion is an awesome deployment tool I adopted recently. When you run dandelion deploy from the command line, it automatically determines what has changed in your Git repository since the last deploy and adds, updates, or deletes just those files over FTP, SFTP, or Amazon S3. Kudos to Scott Nelson for his awesome work on this. Packaged as ... read more »
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Founder Inner Conflict: Engineer vs. Entrepreneur
February 22nd, 2012 at 11:27am | No CommentsWhen working on a project, I constantly find myself at odds with…myself. It’s a battle between the engineer in me wanting to write ideal code and the entrepreneur in me who just wants it working. The engineer wants ideal code, while the entrepreneur is fine with it being hacked together as long as it works ... read more »