Technology

  • Merging WordPress Multisite

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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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  • How to Contribute to WordPress Core

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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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  • Classy Plugins

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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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  • Start with a Unit Test

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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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  • Dependency Injection and Abstract Interfaces in C#

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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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  • URLs and UX

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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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  • Free and Open

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    I write software for a living.  Not something I ever expected to do for a career, but it happened and I’m fairly good at it. I also write software as a hobby.  Different languages and platforms – working with a diverse set of tools makes me a better developer.  I also give away most of the…

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  • Data versus Meaning

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    At a conference last week, I was subjected to all kinds of talks on data, data integrity, data storage, data in the cloud, and data-centered design patterns.  One speaker summed things up perfectly: If you make the center of your world data, then everything else becomes easy. This got me thinking.  From a computer-centric viewpoint it all…

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  • Post Supplements – A Concept

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    A few months ago, WordPress UX Lead Jane Wells posted a request to WordPress’ Trac ticketing system.  The idea was to find a better way to insert “stuff” below WordPress posts: Inserting the sharing and like rows at the bottom of the post text before the byline/classification metadata seems wrong. It should go below that,…

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