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I cried in church this week. If you know me very well you also know that me crying, particular in public, is a rare occurrence. My only consolation is the fact that I wasn’t the only in the congregation with damp eyes. We are deep in a series on Paul’s letter to the Philippians – after over…
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Yesterday, my news feed included an article about a particular retailer’s proposed tax on IE7 users. The first article made it sound like a good idea – users checking using an older browser faced an added 6.8% “tax” meant to address the additional effort required to support the older system. I was constantly on the…
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When I first set up my personal website network, I got a bit carried away. Once I had the first two sites in a multisite network, I started splitting out every category of my blog into its own site – each with its own domain. At the peak, I had: One site for my personal…
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My first ever contribution to WordPress was trimming whitespace from keys stored in the WordPress options table. Basically, I removed a space. But since then, I’ve contributed quite a few other patches to the project I love. Eleven of them have actually made it in to the core codebase! At the Portland WordPress User Group…
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I was asked a few weeks ago why I structured my WordPress plugins the way I do. Anyone who has spent any time looking at my code knows that I like to keep my main functions in a class and wire up action hooks and filters in the root of the plugin. But few people…
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Not everyone is a fan of test-driven development. Writing unit tests for your code can be a laborious task, and it has no immediate benefit to your customers. So why waste any time writing the tests, right? This past week, a colleague of mine summed up the problem pretty well: I’ve finished writing the code for that…
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If you’ve ever written code, you’ve probably written a unit test. If you haven’t written unit tests, you should start. Now. Really. Unit tests let you quickly verify that your code is operating in a predictable fashion. When you make changes down the road, you re-run the same unit tests to make sure nothing broke.…
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When I write software, I ask for people’s opinions. Then, I either listen to what they have to say or I don’t. Some people are very adamant about certain features, options, or use cases. Sometimes I listen, sometimes I ignore them entirely. It’s nothing personal. I have opinions about certain applications that should be ignored…
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I despise broken links. Most of the sites I read on a daily basis are littered with links to this site or that site. Many of them are written quickly to get news stories out promptly and, as a result, are published with typos. It’s one thing when I catch a typo in body content…
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I love a good story. Drama. Action. Romantic comedy. Tragedy. Fiction or non-fiction. It doesn’t really matter. We communicate through stories, and the best stories can connect perfect strangers in ways conversation or common ground never could. Last night I had the opportunity to attend the midnight release of The Hunger Games. I’ve read the series,…