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. […]

(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 […]

The Importance of Usability Testing

Shane Pearlman just published an article on the importance of usability testing that has some good advice. One of the tools mentioned is usertesting.com, which looks like an easy way to get feedback on projects.

Sharing Passwords Securely

It’s common for developers to share login credentials with clients and team members through e-mail or other insecure mediums, but there aren’t a lot firmly established best practices on how to do it properly. I came across a SuperUser thread yesterday that contains several good ideas, and decided to add one of my own as well.

Don’t Move wp-config.php Outside the Document Root

Most WordPress security guides recommend moving wp-config.php outside of the Apache document root in order to prevent the database password being exposed if the PHP engine fails to parse the file, or from being readable to infected scripts running in the domain. Despite the conventional wisdom, though, this technique doesn’t solve those problems, and can actually […]

Unexpected Results When Adding Months To a Date

When adding or subtracting months to a date in PHP, you’ll get some uninuitive results in some cases. For example, strtotime( ‘+1 month’ ) will return the timestamp for July 1st when it’s executed on May 31st, instead of the expected June 30th. This is because a “month” is a fuzzy metric (i.e., some months […]

.htaccess Auth Exceptions by URL

CSS-Tricks has a useful snippet showing how to make exceptions to .htaccess password protection based on the requested URL.

Ian Dunn

WordPress Developer

Designers Shouldn’t Write Code

(Well Organized) Options, Not Decisions

The Importance of Usability Testing

Sharing Passwords Securely

Don’t Move wp-config.php Outside the Document Root

Unexpected Results When Adding Months To a Date

.htaccess Auth Exceptions by URL