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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…
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Don’t Dequeue WordPress’ jQuery
As a moderator on the WordPress Stack Exchange, I end up spending a lot of time on the site. I see lots of great questions, lots of not-so-great questions, and several you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me questions. But the question I see the most often frustrates me: How do I remove WordPress’ jQuery and use Google’s CDN version instead? I have no trouble saying that, if you’re asking this question, you have no business building a website in the first place.
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Distraction Free Reading Mode
I’m a big fan of the “distraction free writing mode” within WordPress. For those of you who haven’t seen it – launch a new post in WordPress and click the full-screen icon on the editor. Your mind will be blown. The sidebars, admin interface, and all of the other UI cruft of the WordPress interface drops away to leave nothing but you and your content. As it should be.
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Making Singletons Safe in PHP
Last time, I argued in favor of the Singleton pattern in WordPress. Singletons make sense in WordPress specifically for several reasons: They live in the global scope without using the already abused/overused [cci]global[/cci] keyword As a distributed application maintained by several hundred developers, they prevent problems that likely arise from others misusing your code But one of the goals of object-oriented software development is to make your code reusable. The Singleton pattern as I explained it last time isn’t really applicable outside of WordPress. Typically, Singletons are a really bad idea. But rather than get hung up on the term and…