Welcome, Old Blogspot Posts

5 minute readHow and Why I Migrated from Blogspot to WordPress.com.

WordCamp Vancouver 2018 Memory Dump

9 minute readAbsolutely everything I can remember from my WordCamp experience this year. Feel free to just skip to the sections that interest you… (And thanks Esther for the photo of Scott, myself, and Jason on the ferry!) Preparation I sent a message out to my WordPress meetup and “WordPress professionals” group asking if anyone wanted to […]

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 […]

6 Essential Steps To Keep WordPress From Getting Hacked

4 minute readThese 6 steps will prevent 99% of hacking attempts on your WordPress website, and most of them only require a click or two, and aren’t very technical. Of course, we all want to keep our website secure and not get hacked. It’s not fun when a hacker takes control of your website… But we also […]

Introduction to the WordPress World

3 minute readThis is an email I sent a friend who’s shopping around for a new career path, and I wanted to describe the “WordPress World” I work in. Hi I really have no idea if the type of work I do would be of interest to you, but I’m happy to try to share about it […]

Meeting with WordPress Professionals

< 1 minute readAt a cafe, I met up with some local folks making their living building sites with WordPress. For me it was especially good getting a bit of a reality check, and hear what was important to them. Besides having a good time socializing (which most of us admitted we rarely do, especially on topics related […]

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 […]

The Digital Dark Age & Your Blog

5 minute readWe are living in the digital dark age. Wikipedia says: the digital dark age is a lack of historical information in the digital age as a direct result of outdated file formats, software, or hardware that becomes corrupt, scarce, or inaccessible as technologies evolve and data decays. Another way to say that: did you think […]

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 […]