Do All Websites Need to be Responsive Right Now?

I agree with the principles behind responsive web design, but I think this is a good thing to keep in mind when talking to clients: Timing is everything. For businesses that are trying to turn a profit, their return on investment (ROI) matters. Although mobile is important, it still amounts to a very small percentage of […]

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GoDaddy.com Doesn’t Protect Customer’s Passwords

Unfortunately from time to time I have the unpleasant task of dealing with GoDaddy in one form or another, and today I noticed another failure with their services that caught me by surprise. If you knew how low my opinion of GoDaddy was to begin with, then you’d realize how bad the problem must have […]

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XML-RPC Enabled by Default in WordPress 3.5

XML-RPC will be enabled by default in WordPress 3.5, but I personally think that’s a bad idea from a security perspective. A fellow Seattle WP developer, Ben Lobaugh, explains why on the Trac ticket.. Luckily, it’s easy to disable it. Just add this to a plugin: add_filter( 'xmlrpc_enabled', '__return_false' ); I’ve added that to my […]

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Designing Object-Oriented Plugins for a Procedural Application

Note: This was originally a post to the Seattle PHP Meetup mailing list, but I’m reproducing it here to generate a discussion about the topic with people outside the meetup. * * * * I write a lot plugins for WordPress, and I like to make them object-oriented, even though WordPress itself is mostly procedural. […]

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Designers Shouldn’t Write Code

A discussion came up recently on the Seattle WordPress Meetup discussion board that hits on a big pet peeve of mine — designers writing code. After replying with my own thoughts, I wanted to see what other people were saying about the topic, so I did some searching and came across this essay by Davide Casali. […]

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(Well Organized) Options, Not Decisions

The “Decisions, not options” philosophy argues that giving users too many options can make tweaking a piece of software a difficult and frustrating experience. When a user wants to make a small change, and they find themselves presented with five pages of disorganized options, many will simply give up rather than wade through each one […]

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