Responsive, square elements with JavaScript/jQuery
A simple idea… If you’re a designer, it’s pretty natural to want a bunch of squares to line up next to each other. And if you’re a designer who’s up on responsive design best practices (which we...
View ArticleGlobals and Variable Scope in PHP and WordPress
One of the most maligned features of WordPress is the rampant use of “globals”. There are huge discussions about why heavy reliance on global scoped variables is a bad design decision, but that debate...
View ArticleMaking Your First Shortcode Plugin in WordPress
Shortcodes are, as I said in my last post about them, a bit like magic. They’re a way that you can, with very little code or concern about complexity, include large collections of markup or even custom...
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Simplest WordPress Security Win: Always Be Updating
Security is a big and complex area. Everything from the quality of your encryption algorithms, the privileges of your file access policy, and the nature of your cryptographic signature are part of...
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What Makes a Good Bug Report?
One of the more complicated “easy” things in software is providing a useful bug report. Literally anyone can encounter a “bug,” “flaw” “defect,” or even “desired-feature” while using a product and...
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We Bought a Website!
We didn’t have time to share this last week, but we are pretty excited that we bought a little WordPress-focused site called WPShout. We did manage to get a post out over there about the transition of...
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Responsive Inspector Chrome Extension
It’s become almost cliche: the modern web designer or front-end developer sitting there all day, dragging the side of their browser window back and forth, back and forth. They’ve got to make sure your...
View ArticleWhy I Love Markdown
Markdown is great. If you’ve found yourself composing a lot of HTML-based documents, you know how frustrating it can be to make sure you match all your tags and type all those less-than and...
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The Basics of Markdown
As I professed my fervent love for Markdown last week, I’ll spare you — go read why Markdown’s great if you haven’t — but to say that Markdown is a quick way to easily create all the niceties of HTML...
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Reveal.js For Fun and Profit
Somewhat jokingly, when I shared last week’s post about using Markdown to our Facebook page I threw in a line about how Markdown should destroy Microsoft Word. While I don’t really hate Word, or any...
View ArticleBasics of Programming: Understanding PHP Functions
More than anything else, programming is built on top of the idea of enclosed and reusable functionality. While it is possible to write a working program without the ability to enclose and reuse...
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The Five Software Tools I’m Most Thankful For in 2013
The Thanksgiving holiday is tomorrow in the US, and I thought it made sense to take some time to reflect on some of my favorite tools this year. Most of these are one’s I’ve used for a while and still...
View ArticleWhat’s Technical Debt?
We wrote a while back about how a website, web app, or any other kind of software is best thought of as an investment in your business. Because it’s an investment, it’s best not to think in terms of...
View ArticleUnderstanding Unix Time
Metric time is one of those ideas I just naturally think about from time to time. Time is such a strange system: there are 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day, 365 days in...
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Better client communication through analogies
If you’re a self-employed developer, managing client communication is your job, and your skill at it will impact your project’s success just as dramatically as the quality of your code. One great way...
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Require Featured Image Plugin Now Supports All WordPress Post Types
I found some time over the recent holidays to update our free and simple Required Featured Image plugin. So I’m excited to tell you about an important new feature: it now works for Posts, Pages, and...
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The CSS Default Box Model is Utter Madness: A Parable
SCENE: A housing development. –Thanks for coming over. Are you the foreman for Constructing Stylish Sanctuaries, LLC? –Our name’s a mouthful. Just call us “CSS” for short. –Great. Well, as you can see,...
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What’s Wrong with the CSS Box Model, and How to Fix It
This is a follow-up to last week’s post about the CSS default box model. It’s a more in-depth technical discussion of the problem, and it describes the awesome alternative: box-sizing: border-box. What...
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Drawing with PHP and GD
A few thing are true about this topic. First, you can draw (make images) with PHP. Second, only a sadist would try to replace a Photoshop-like tool with any programming interface to a drawing tool....
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The internet has solved your problem, or: how to Google
I think everyone’s experience of working online is that you don’t know nearly enough to do what you want to do. You’d think this problem gets better for web developers, and in some ways it does—but it...
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