Year: 2014

  • The Personal Blog

    There is something about the personal blog, yourname.com, where you control everything and get to do whatever the hell pleases you. There is something about linking to one of those blogs and then saying something. It’s like having a conversation in public with each other. This is how blogging was in the early days. And this…

  • All the Options in the WordPress Theme Customizer

    In reality we’re taking the same problem of providing too many options and migrating them from the Dashboard to the WordPress Theme Customizer. Bummer. Tom McFarlin nails it once again.

  • wordpress-rest-api

    Speaking of JavaScript, here’s a Node.js-based client for the JSON REST API that’ll eventually make its way into WordPress core.

  • Is JavaScript taking over WordPress?

    Unless something totally crazy happens, WordPress is going to be written in PHP for the foreseeable future. However, the more that core turns into an API endpoint for all the JavaScript that’s being added to it, the less beholden the project has to be to PHP. So maybe you should think about buying a JavaScript…

  • Hashcash

    It’s nice that someone is working on an alternative to the Akismet anti-spam plugin monopoly. With that being said, I saw a server load quadruple [from 4 to 16] in under 3 minutes after enabling the plugin on a friend’s site. It was right in the middle of being mercilessly hammered by spammers, but I…

  • WordPress on nginx + HHVM with Heroku Buildpacks

    This is tempting. Extremely tempting. Perhaps I should dedicate some time to playing with this over the long holiday weekend.

  • PHPNG devs boasts major WordPress performance increases

    It’s nice to see that the PHP team isn’t taking HHVM lying down. We have to wait for PHP 5.7 to get PHPNG and it’s 20% performance increase though. If you’re the type who runs his/her own server, there are test build instructions. So maybe you don’t have to wait. But I wouldn’t use this…

  • Improving the URL bar

    This idea is a pretty divisive issue in the web development and security communities, but I’m really into it. If you’d like to try it out, load up a copy of Chrome Canary and visit chrome://flags/#origin-chip-in-omnibox.

  • 443s & Heartbleed

    We are building the most important technologies for the global economy on shockingly underfunded infrastructure. We are truly living through Code in the Age of Cholera. Dan Kaminsky’s thoughts on Heartbleed — and the lessons we can learn from this whole crazy-ass scramble — are fantastic and worth your time. Especially if you give even half…

  • March Badness

    Despite not following NCAA basketball, I was lured into participating in a work bracket with the promise of prizes. So I did the lazy thing and took the President’s bracket and tweaked it with Nate Silver’s predictions. At first, I my picks were on fire. I was tied for first with a coworker who I…

  • The qualities of a great WordPress contributor

    Required reading from Nacin for any aspiring WordPress core contributor.

  • Debug Bar Slow Actions

    Debug Bar Slow Actions is an extension for the popular Debug Bar plugin. It adds a new panel with a list of the top 100 slowest actions (and filters) during the current page request. Konstantin has done a great job with this. If you do any amount of site troubleshooting & optimizing, this is worth…

  • Writing Open Source Code (Or “Here Be Dragons”)

    Great shit from Tom McFarlin that should be required reading for every new open source developer.

  • The Code History of WordPress

    Nice history lesson from Marko Heijnen.

  • WP Security Audit Log

    Very nice, comprehensive activity logging plugin. Now with Multisite support.

  • When to use target=”_blank”

    TL;DR: Almost never.

  • Plugin Organizer

    Plugin Organizer adds a whole new level of optimization to WordPress. When activated, you can selectively disable plugins on sections of your site and re-order how they’re loaded. I’m seriously going to have to carve out some time this weekend to fuck around with this.

  • Good People of WordPress: We are Fighting a War

    Some good shit from Rami Abraham. Open-source communities are the front lines against a force few will ever comprehend. WordPress is one of the most influential and powerful of open-source communities on the Internet. Who is our enemy? Closed-source content management systems, sketchy data-mining practices, terrible privacy policies, and the un-ending, Draconian greed of so…

  • Good First Bug

    Want to become a core contributor? Do you have absolutely no idea where to start? Consider keeping an eye on the good-first-bug tag on Trac.

  • Git mirrors for WordPress

    For all practical purposes, the SVN and Git repositories are now equals. Pick your poison; use whatever you’d like for all your development and deployment needs. Fuck. Yes.