The 5 Promises of User-Led Software Development

5 minute readIt’s easy for WordPress plugin developers to be endlessly chasing “modern best practices” and building features they love, but actual users don’t care about. Over the past few months, I’ve been experimenting with a development methodology that avoids waste and stays focused on users’ priorities. I call it “Lazy Software Development,” and this is how it works…

Dealing with Amazon Product Advertising API Policy Changes

3 minute readYesterday, a site I maintain, earlychildhoodeducator.com, was having issues communicating with Amazon’s Product Advertising API. Here’s what I learned about the problem and how we fixed it (in case you’re likewise having issues with it!) How we use Amazon Product Advertising API The website is for an online school, and they have links to the […]

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 […]

To Fund WordPress Plugin Development Through Sponsorship, or More Traditional Models?

5 minute readHow do you make money when you give your product away for free? Let’s consider the common open-source business models, and explore the viability of supporting development entirely through sponsorships.

How I Got All A's on webpagetest.org

2 minute readI heard about webpagetest.org during my most recent WordCamp. It’s a service for analyzing your website’s performance. From what I can tell, it’s completely supported by sponsors, so it’s free to use. I ran my WordPress meetup’s site (which, obviously, runs on WordPress) through its analysis, and initially got C grades or so. Not fabulous. […]

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, […]

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 […]

Which Way Do Your Slashes Face in PHP?

4 minute readWhen writing out filepaths and URLs, should you use forward slashes / or backslashes \? Windows expects one, whereas Unix-style operating systems (Linux and Mac OSs, primarily) expect another. PHP has two built-in solutions, but both have problems, especially if you’re working with WordPress. Backstory At work, I’ve recently had some trouble getting my linux […]