-
Automated WordPress Development
Whether or not you make it to WordCamp Seattle, you too can benefit from merging Grunt into your WordPress development workflow! A best-practice in web development is to keep JS and CSS to a minimum by merging multiple files and minifying that file so it downloads quickly. This is a tedious process for many, and easily forgotten during a manual release packaging process. Grunt is a local development tool that helps optimize this workflow, empowering developers and designers to focus on what they do best. It streamlines both active development and the final release process when pushing code to production.…
-
Securing Forms Without Captcha
Captchas are a terrible user experience. They put the onus of spam protection on the visitor filling out the form and, personally, show me how lazy you are as a site administrator. There are a hundred different ways you can protect your site from spam on the server side – why would you forego these options and force your visitors to jump through additional hoops? Furthermore, captchas can negatively impact the overall user experience on your site for some. They can actually hurt your conversion rate for others. Instead of using a captcha, let’s look at two passive things you…
-
JavaScript Astrophysics
As computers continue to develop and grow, so do the things they’re capable of; just about any laptop capable of playing FarmVille can also run a sophisticated astrophysics simulation. In college, it took me a few minutes with a room-sized supercomputer to derive the Chandrasekhar Limit. The same derivation can now run in JavaScript, embedded in a web page, in a fraction of a second.
-
Plugin Review – Spam Free WordPress
Update 7/31/2013—The following review is of an older version of the plugin. As of the newer 2.0 branch, many of the issues below have been resolved. A friend of mine directed me to a new spam fighting plugin via a retweet today. My Latest Favorite Plugin: Spam Free WordPress http://t.co/3tQ3a573Ls — SureFire Web Services (@SureFireWebServ) May 23, 2013 I’m always on the lookout for cool new software, and as I highly respect my friend’s opinion, I had to take a look. Two things about the plugin download page immediately raised some red flags, so I wrote the plugin off and…
-
Ludicrous Speed: WordPress Caching with Redis
When I first started hosting my own sites, I had no idea what caching was or why it was important. Then I wrote a couple of popular blog posts, and my server crashed. Fast forward a few years, and I’m running a few different websites on a few different servers. Some get a steady stream of traffic; others get a huge spike now and again when a post is picked up by Hacker News. In both cases, configuring your cache is a great way to keep things from failing. I’m very happy to say that I’ve finally set up a…
-
The Hackiest Hack that Ever Was Hacked
I was first introduced to Plupload when I was building websites in .Net. I had some great HTML5 file upload tools that worked wonders in my browser of choice, but most of my colleagues (and about 80% of our clients) were using a browser that didn’t support the API. I used Plupload as a reliable cross-browser tool that would use HTML5 where available and fall back on Silverlight for those users who hadn’t yet upgraded to a real browser. Cooler still, WordPress incorporated Plupload in to core! Now I could use the same tool for both my .Net projects and my…
-
1Password: Better and Worse for Personal Data Security
Ever since I was a victim of digital identity theft in college, I’ve kept a keen eye on data security. I use long passwords that mix case, numbers, and punctuation. I impose ridiculous must-change-passwords-every-6-months rules on myself. And I never, ever write my passwords down for others to see. But still, I feel like things could be more secure. As the number of online services I use continues to grow, the number of passwords I need to remember is quickly becoming unmanageable. A few months ago, I actually found myself breaking a personal rule and reusing a password. To help…