Here’s a great quote from Jeff Atwood’s post on why he decided to step back from Stack Exchange:
I finally realized that success at the cost of my children is not success. It is failure.
Author Archives: Ian Dunn
Including External View Files in WordPress Widgets
I ran into a problem today while cleaning up and modifying some widgets. I moved all of the markup inside widget() to an external view file, and then included it via require_once(), which worked fine. I then tried to do the same thing inside form(), but didn’t get any output. It turns out that you […]
Pushing Back Against Unreasonable Employer Demands
I just read a good article on work/life balance from Kendall Guillemette. It’s encouraging to hear others in the industry pushing back against the sense of entitlement many employers have regarding our time (which is to say, our lives). I think the 40-hour work week was one of the most important advances of the labor movement, […]
Comparing WordPress, Drupal and Joomla in 2011
Ok, so it’s already 2012, but I just came across an article comparing the three from last year and it was a good read. Like a lot of articles, though, the real value is in the comments more than the article itself. Going into it I had the impression that Joomla was a stagnant mess, but […]
FastCGI errors after PHP upgrade
I ran into a small problem upgrading PHP from 5.3.5 to 5.3.10 on a MediaTemple CentOS VPS today. The upgrade completed without any errors, but when I reloaded the site I got a “500 Internal Server Error” message. It was the stock installation, so I’m not sure which module it was using or what repository […]
WordPress Backup Options
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
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
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
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
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
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
This Fiddle shows how to pass extra parameters to an event handler function in jQuery.
Why Hash-bang URLs are Bad
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 […]
Another Obtuse Attempt to Control the Internet
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
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 […]
Different Approaches to Building a Theme-based Site
Mark Root-Wiley wrote a great article on the pros and cons of using premium themes, writing child themes and writing themes from scratch. It’s discussed in the context of WordPress themes, but most of it is applicable to other CMSs as well. I think it’s a good introduction to give clients when discussing which method […]
Differences between query_posts(), get_posts() and WP_Query
This WordPress Answers page explains the differences between the query_post() and get_posts() functions, and their relation to the WP_Query class. They both use WP_Query internally, but should be used in different contexts. Using them in the wrong context could lead to bugs that are hard to track down.
What Really Motivates Us
Dan Pink’s talk at RSA presents some really interesting ideas about what really motivates people to work. Contrary to popular opinion among management, mainstream studies reveal that people don’t really care about making more money, as long as they have enough to meet their basic needs. What really drives us is mastering our craft, having autonomy […]
Re-Abolish Slavery Ribbon
I just released a new WordPress plugin into the repository that raises awareness about modern-day slavery by adding a “Re-Abolish Slavery” ribbon to WordPress sites. It’s running on this site, so you can see a live example by looking in the upper-right hand corner. The ribbon links to the Not For Sale campaign, which is […]
Preventing Sites From Opening New Tabs/Windows
UPDATE: There’s now a Chrome extension called TheOne which does this, so you don’t need to create your own user script. I wrote earlier about why it’s wrong for websites to force links to open in a new tab or window, but it’ll probably be at least a few years before the majority of […]