Ian Dunn

WordPress Backup Options

Ian — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 00:22:06 +0000

Nathan Ingram put together a thorough post on backing up WordPress and a chart comparing various plugins and services.

Faster jQuery Selector Calls with Chaining

Ian — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 19:22:20 +0000

Rob Tarr ran some benchmarks to prove the claim that chaining jQuery selector methods is faster than placing them all in a single method call.

Placing Snippets in a Functionality Plugin Instead of Theme

Ian — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 19:17:18 +0000

Dave Clements has a great suggestion for adding snippets to a WordPress site in a way that will preserve them between theme changes: create a simple functionality plugin.

Why “Click Here” is A Bad Practice

Ian — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 19:13:55 +0000

Using “click here” as anchor text is considered a bad practice because it doesn’t tell the user what the link will direct them to by itself, without users having to read the surrounding text; because “clicking” is irrelevant in many situations (assistive devices, smartphones, etc); and because it is meaningless to search engines indexing the page.

Scaling WordPress Installations

Ian — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 00:36:52 +0000

TJ Stein gave a really good presentation at WordCamp Chicago 2011 about scaling and performance issues with WordPress installations. He focuses a lot on using ngnix instead of Apache, but also covers PHP object caching, Varnish, CDNs, benchmarking, etc. It’s a good overview of current practices, but there’s also a lot of specific tips throughout.

Rejecting Small Font Sizes

Ian — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 06:53:28 +0000

D Bnonn Tennant makes a good case for using larger font sizes, although I would probably vote for 14 pixels instead of 16. And of course it should be set in em’s instead of pixels.

Passing Extra Arguments to a jQuery Event Handler

Ian — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 21:31:35 +0000

This Fiddle shows how to pass extra parameters to an event handler function in jQuery.

Why Hash-bang URLs are Bad

Ian — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 19:02:52 +0000

WebMonkey has a good article explaining why hash-bang URLS are a bad idea. If you’re not familiar with them, they have #! symbols at the beginning of the path, e.g. http://twitter.com/#!/username. They rely entirely on JavaScript to parse and therefore make the site inaccessible to browsers without JavaScript (or those with it turned off by the user), assistive technologies that people with disabilities use, and search engines that haven’t been modified to recognize them.

Another Obtuse Attempt to Control the Internet

Ian — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 04:09:50 +0000

Check out Mark Jaquith’s post on the PROTECT IP Act for a basic rundown on why it’s bad and what you can do to help stop it.

Deflating the Hype Behind Cloud Computing

Ian — Sat, 12 Nov 2011 06:18:16 +0000

In a lot of ways I’m leery of the recent trends towards converting traditional products that you buy once and own into services that you have to lease every month, and hosting data with centralized corporate networks instead of locally, so I appreciate Mark Maunder’s post on his experiences collocating his company’s hardware instead of using the cloud. I think there are valid cases for the cloud, but there are also a lot of drawbacks that get dismissed in all the hype surrounding it.