Eric Mann's Blog

  • Courage and Prayer

    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 […]

  • Universal User Support

    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 […]

  • Merging WordPress Multisite

    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 […]

  • How to Contribute to WordPress Core

    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 […]

  • Classy Plugins

    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 […]

  • Start with a Unit Test

    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 […]

  • Dependency Injection and Abstract Interfaces in C#

    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. […]

  • You Have an Opinion?

    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 […]

  • URLs and UX

    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 […]

  • Happy Hunger Games

    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, […]