Say, man, do you use the Developer plugin for WordPress? No? Well, it’d be a lot cooler if you did…
Category: Geekery
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Ag
I’ve been using ack instead of grep for a few months now. And things have been going pretty great on that front. But One Thing Well just pointed at the (unfortunately named) Silver Searcher — which claims to deliver results 3 to 5 times faster than ack.
Mercifully, the command is “ag” and it can be quickly installed via Homebrew. So I’ll definitely be giving this a try soon.
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Antik
It’s a good thing the TikTok team had an analog watch module to fall back on after Apple changed the iPod nano form factor. If they decide to keep doing the whole modular watch thing, they should at least be able to change up the form factor to something a little less clunky. So that’s a blessing in disguise, right?
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Socialite
I normally have a pretty strong dislike for social sharing buttons — mainly because of the overall load time they add to a site — however, Socialite.js (and its WordPress-ready counterpart) may have softened my opinion on them.
By loading the social sharing buttons asynchronously, it can cut the amount of initial page requests down considerably. So if you have a site that depends on those annoying little chiclets, check it out.
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The Auditor
Interconnect IT’s The Auditor looks like a really nice audit log plugin for WordPress. But it retails for $249. That means that I’m not going to get to play with it any time soon.
I wonder if I can get away with expensing it…
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Super Hexagon
Super Hexagon Trailer
Practically every spare moment I’ve had over the last few days has been filled with very short rounds of Super Hexagon for iOS. It can be sort of hard at first — at least until you get the hang of the controls — but it’s also insanely addictive.
If you value your free time, stay away at all costs. But if you prefer to lose hours cursing under your breath every few seconds, check it out!
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I’m Feeling Saucy
While trying to get Internet Explorer 8 installed on my Mac via the usually handy ievms — don’t bother, the 2nd and 4th RAR file are corrupted — I stumbled across Sauce Labs.
Sauce Labs offers cross browser testing environments on totally clean virtual machines. That means no more having to deal with a bunch of half-forgotten virtual Windows installs or grabbing screenshots from BrowserLab. Just tell Sauce Labs what sort of browser and operating system combo you need and you’ll have access to it in seconds.
But what’s most helpful (to me, at least) is that it records a video of the whole interactive session that you can then share with a developer or client.
Plans with unlimited browser time — and a bunch of other useful stuff — start at $12 a month. They’ve also got a free plan that gives you 30 minutes of browser time every month to do your thing. But hopefully it’s worth enough that you’ll pay for it and I can keep my free account…
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De-dupe “Open With…”
A few weeks ago, I started seeing multiple entries for Pixelmator in the “Open With…” area of my Finder’s contextual menu. And while I thought it was weird, I didn’t find it too annoying. So I just ignored it.
Then, last night, I saw multiple entries for Simple Comic when I was trying to open a compressed file in another app. So I did a little digging and found this simple one-line fix over at IT Pixie:
Just copy & drop that into your terminal app of choice and let it run. Once it’s all done, Control + Option + Click the Finder icon in your dock and select “Relaunch”. Once the finder comes back, “Open With…” should be all clean.
I’m mostly saving this here for my own benefit, but maybe it’ll help at least one other person out there.
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Cache Rules Everything Around Me
When it comes to speed, one of the easiest things someone hosting their own WordPress install can do is enable expires headers. Expires headers basically tell the browsers visiting your site to cache the static stuff — like images and scripts — so they don’t have to be downloaded every time one of your pages needs them.
To do this, I’ve been using some fairly straightforward .htaccess rules that I adapted from the ones in HTML5 Boilerplate. But since version 4.0 of Boilerplate came out about a week ago, I went in and cleaned things up a bit. And now that everything is looking good, I figured that I should probably share them.
So here are the new & improved rules I’m using:
All you need to do to benefit from this is add the code above to your site’s .htaccess file. Just make sure you don’t have any rules pertaining to expires hanging around from an old plugin or something else and you should be golden.
