The Meaning of Freemius’ Dashboard Stats

4 minute read Ever since WordPress.org removed the Active Install Growth Chart I’ve been more reliant on the stats provided by Freemius, but their meaning wasn’t obvious. I talked with Freemius’ support, Leo, to get some clarification and thought I’d share what we found. What I thought Freemius’ Stats Meant Most of the Freemius stats around money (what […]

Letting wpcowichan.org expire, but there’s a book

< 1 minute read About 3 years ago I started the Cowichan Valley WordPress Meetup with my then-neighbour Sheryl Gilding. We ran it for about a year, it was a great growing experience for me, and it was really good connecting with fellow WordPress users trying to share their ideas with the world. I intended to stop hosting new […]

Using Jquery UI in WordPress Plugins and THemes without Conflicts

5 minute read jQuery UI is a great way to add slick user interface elements to your WordPress plugin or theme, provided it’s done in a way that doesn’t blow up other plugins or themes!

How to Send Debug Info with WordPress’ Health CHeck

2 minute read Tl;Dr; To copy your site’s Health Check info, go to on WordPress 5.1 and earlier, install the Health Check & Troubleshooting plugin; on WordPress 5.2 and later skip this WordPress admin dashboard under “Tools” click “Site Health” click “Info” tab click “Copy info to clipboard” paste it More Details In WordPress 5.2, the plugin Health […]

How to Validate Freemius Licenses Outside of a Plugin

8 minute read This technical tutorials shows how I enable a SAAS site to validate a Freemius license key sent from a user’s site.

How to Relabel WordPress’ “Publish” Button for Custom Post Types

3 minute read For my WordPress plugin Print My Blog, I wanted to change WordPress’ “Publish” button to instead say “Save”, and it was complicated enough to merit sharing a blog post. My Situation The plugin registered a custom post type called “Print Material”, which isn’t publicly visible on the website. So the button “Publish” was misleading because […]

Take Shame in your Work, Not Pride

5 minute read I used to take pride in my work, especially building software, but I’m learning that’s actually a problem. Building something great can actually get in the way of doing something great. Before I explain, here’s a couple examples. You Heard of the $400 Squeezing Machine, Right? If not, this is the summary: a Silicon Valley […]

Introducing printmy.blog

3 minute read I finally created a new site dedicated to my WordPress plugin Print My Blog: printmy.blog Important: if you’d like to continue following development of Print My Blog, please subscribe to the mailing list. Thanks! All posts about Print My Blog transparency reports and tutorials will be on that site going forward; this site will still […]

Print My Blog Transparency Report – January 2020

6 minute read This month post titles in printouts were improved, there are more options for hyperlinks in printouts, there was a lot of code cleanup, and I have more accurate active install growth to report.

Print My Blog Transparency Report – December 2019

5 minute read Active Installs took a hit upon release of version 2.0 and front end print buttons, but there were lots of new features and donations nearly doubled.