The Necessity of Contracts

Mike Monteiro and Gabe Levine gave a great presentation for Creative Mornings on the necessity of contracts when doing client work. I never really liked using them because 95% of projects go smoothly and it seems kind of impersonal, but after a recent experience and talking to other developers, I’m beginning to see the need for them, and […]

Updating Packages in an OpenVZ VPS

Sam Mingolelli has posted some useful solutions to common problems when running yum update inside an OpenVZ VE.

Basic Google Maps Placemarks Plugin

I wrote a new WordPress plugin for a side project and just released it into the repository. It creates a custom post type for markers and then inserts them into an embedded Google Map, using the post’s featured image as the map icon.

Note: all support requests should be posted to the support forums.

Custom Post Type Fields Overwritten

The past few days I’ve run up against a weird bug in a plugin I’m writing, where the custom post type fields would be overwritten with empty values randomly. Creating or editing a post would save the values fine, but I’d come back 5 minutes later and they’d be empty. I finally got it sorted, […]

Parse Error When Installing WordPress 3.2 on a PHP4 Server

This is the error you’ll get if you try to install WordPress 3.2 on a PHP4 server:

Parse error: parse error, unexpected T_VARIABLE in /path/to/your/directory/wp-includes/load.php on line 566

It’s because the clone keyword doesn’t exist in PHP4.

admin-ajax.php Response Fails When Called from Domain Alias

I’m writing a WordPress plugin that uses AJAX and I had everything setup and working fine for awhile. I came back to the code a few hours later and all of the sudden I was getting a failed response, even though the code hadn’t changed. I got the correct JSON response when I loaded the […]

What Really Makes a Password Strong?

Bob Yexley turned me on to passphrases a few years ago when he linked to what became a seminal article on the topic by Robert Hensing. The argument is that passphrases — random words strung together to form a phrase, e.g., monkey stars hatchback questioning — are both more secure and easier to remember than what are […]

Ian Dunn

WordPress Developer

The Necessity of Contracts

Updating Packages in an OpenVZ VPS

Basic Google Maps Placemarks Plugin

Custom Post Type Fields Overwritten

Parse Error When Installing WordPress 3.2 on a PHP4 Server

admin-ajax.php Response Fails When Called from Domain Alias

What Really Makes a Password Strong?