It wasn’t long ago that I was using a laptop as my primary machine. I thought I’d never buy another desktop. Nowadays the desktop machines blow the laptops away in performance. I use my laptop when I’m on the road, and look forward to getting home to my desktop. I’m going to have a second…
Development Archives
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I fixed two issues that have been problems on this site since I launched the new site back in November: Receiving pingbacks didn’t work. Per post comment feeds were broken. The first issue was a little tricky. I had a pretty good guess what the problem was, but didn’t know where to look to fix…
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Create a nice web standards compliant web site, testing in Firefox and Safari. Test the site in IE6 and create IE6 specific hacks for things that need tweaking. Test the site in IE7 and create IE7 specific hacks for things that need tweaking. Whenever you add new features to the site, try to remember to…
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When you’re hacking IE6 compatibility into a site, always remember to try the quick fix first: .your-class-name { position: relative; zoom: 1; } When it works don’t ask why, just move on to the next issue.
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Steve O’Grady and I have a recurring debate about package management systems and which approach is best for users. Somewhere during the discussion I realized that over the last year or two, I’ve actually begun using Subversion as a package management system. Pretty much every open source web application I use on a production server…
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To everyone developing cool Twitter client applications, I have a couple of requests: Give me an option of hiding @username tweets if the username in question is not in my friends list. Make the @username in the tweet a link to said username’s twitter page so I can easily see what the response is to…
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Just a reminder, TechStars applications are due at the end of the month. I know there’s been a great response so far, but there’s still time to get in if you’re interested. I’m really looking forward to my role in the program, with such a great group of mentors I think I’ll probably learn as…
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I get a lot more inquiries about custom WordPress plugin development than I can accept and I’m pretty much booked solid on a couple of projects over the next few months. I’d like to have a couple of folks in my virtual rolodex that I can refer people to when I can’t take on their…
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I’ve made good progress on my Twitter Tools plugin, enough that I’m putting it out there as a beta release so people can play with it. Here is a progress report from the roadmap I posted: Tweets will be stored in a separate table because this gives us the most flexibility to work with them.…
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The debug versions of Link Harvest have yielded a mess of inconsistent data. It appears that the link harvest action can fail for any number of reasons. Some of them: PHP running out of memory. Hitting the script execution time limit. Downloading a media file (.mp3, .mov, etc.). Overzealous firewalls and plugins like Bad Behavior.…
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Many thanks to everyone who stopped by and shared an opinion on how they think a Twitter integration WordPress plugin should work. I’ve started coding on the project and here are some of the decisions I’ve made and features it will have: Tweets will be stored in a separate table because this gives us the…
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Last night I started thinking about the content I am creating on Twitter and how I’d like to keep a copy of that data. My initial thought is to create a plugin that would check my Twitter (JSON – yay!) feed every hour or so and save a copy of new tweets in a new…
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I’ve created a little feedback form that I’m sending to clients once I’ve completed their job. Nothing fancy or formal, just an opportunity for me to get some feedback and for them to share anything they’d like me to know. I sent my first one last week. Here is the e-mail: Hi Joe– In an…
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Continuing on my browser thread from last week, another browser trend is the recent growth of browsers that need to be supported/tested on. Since IE 4 or so, the number of browsers out there seemed to be shrinking. It was easier when you just had to make sure things looked right in IE 6, Firefox…
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Note: This is the ninth in a series of articles about the building of alexking.org 2.0. One of the big reasons I wanted to put all of the alexking.org content into WordPress was because I’d found that I’d begun putting almost everything into the blog rather than other areas of the site. It wasn’t a…