Handling Polluted JSON in AJAX

5 minute readThe bane of all Javascript code using jQuery.ajax() is polluted JSON responses: when some HTML or other junk gets into your JSON response, making it unparsable and bringing the whole system to a screeching halt. In this post, I’ll show what you can do with polluted JSON to keep everything working. How It’s Supposed to […]

The Really Easy Way to Make a WordPress Plugin Translation-Ready

3 minute readMaking a WordPress plugin available in a user’s preferred language used to be more complicated. Now it’s really easy. I want to share the up-to-date way (as of 2019) to get your plugin ready for translating into everyone’s languages. I’ll skip the complexities of translations and get right to it. 1. Set Your Plugin’s Minimum […]

Making a Django Custom Model Field, Form Field, and Widget

2 minute readFor a recent Django task, I wanted to create a custom field that used a new widget by default to display the input differently. The basic steps to do this are: Create a custom Widget (child class of django.contrib.admin.widgets.Input) Create a custom Form Field (child class of django.forms.Field) that uses your custom widget Create a […]

How to Make Horrible Software Comparisons

3 minute readSoftware comparison articles can be helpful, but most are horrible. They should educate, compare, and recommend. But usually, they’re just filler words that convey no actual meaning. Here are some common mistakes of horrible software comparisons… Universally Picking a Winner It’s ridiculous to pick a universal winner. Eg, if you’re comparing Event Espresso to EventBrite, […]

PHP's array_shift Performance

< 1 minute readPHP’s array_shift is a relatively slow way to fetch the first item from an array; it’s much better to use reset. For example, array_shift() modifies the original array and can be pretty slow because it needs to completely reindex the array (remove first element then shuffle everything else forward by one “slot”), so unless you […]

Getting Started Contributing Code to WordPress Gutenberg in Laragon

7 minute readThis post documents how I setup WordPress Gutenberg for local development on Windows 7, using Laragon instead of Docker, and made my first pull request to the project. Most folks wanting to test and modify WordPress’ Gutenberg use Docker to manage their environment. That’s great because it’s especially consistent. But I’ve been happy using Laragon […]

URL Validation in WordPress

3 minute readIf your WordPress website/theme/plugin allows users to submit URLs, and you’re not sanitizing them properly, you could have a whole host of security problems. On the flipside, if you’re removing too much, you might not be allowing valid URLs either. This issue is pretty complex, and there’s quite a bit of confusion surrounding it, but […]

Adding Support for Foreign Characters to Django

5 minute readThis post explains the changes I needed to make to a Python Django 1.8 website in order to add Unicode (special character) support. The Situation I’ve been helping run a Django 1.8 website, and we’ve been getting tired of errors everytime a user uses accents, foreign language characters, or curly quotes. Errors like DjangoUnicodeDecodeError at […]

Let's Decentralize Git Again

2 minute readDoesn’t anybody else find it strange nearly all open source code is distributed on a closed-source website, GitHub, owned by Microsoft? That’s a bit like all the world’s charitable organizations being ran by a for-profit mega corporation. As I understand it, Git’s big differentiating feature from Subversion, the big version-control system that preceded it, was […]

How to Migrate from a Self-Hosted WordPress Site to WordPress.com

13 minute readIf you’ve tried self-hosting WordPress, but found it a struggle, and are ready to try WordPress.com instead, this is for you. Notice I said “try”– you can start off by just trying WordPress.com, and if it meets your needs, you can finish the move. This is the overview of what you’ll need to do: Setup […]