THE PENDING DRAFT

WordPress Theme Repository Data

May 1, 2015

Have you ever wondered how many Themes in the official WordPress repository support the Customizer? Or how many are based on the Underscores base theme?

Devin Price grabbed all themes from the repository and ran some test to find out.

I don’t intend to repost his findings here, so head over to his post on WP Theming and dig through the numbers yourself. He also shared how he did it and what tools he used if you’re keen to run some tests of your own.

WP Theming – Theme Repository Data

Edge

April 30, 2015

Marcel Wichmann (UARRR) about the Icon for Microsoft’s new Edge Browser and why he thinks that it is a good idea. I couldn’t agree more.

I think it’s a good choice and many young, hip internet people forget about the millions and millions of people using Windows. That’s obviously not us, it’s our parents, people in offices, people that don’t care for technology. Those people double-click on a small blue “e” everyday to log into their hotmail e-mail accounts to see pictures of children, funny PowerPoint presentations and delete their 200 spam mails, because they don’t know there’s another way of living online.

UARRR.org – Microsoft Edge Icon

WordPress Plugin Profiler

April 29, 2015

plugin-profiler

Contrary to popular belief, adding plugins to your WordPress site is not necessarily harmful to the performance of your page. One “bad” plugin alone can potentially bring your site down while the site can run smooth with a 100 installed plugins. It all depends on which plugins you install and how they are built.

Luckily, there are tools like this little plugin i just found called Plugin Profiler by Danny van Kooten. It measures the loading time with all plugins deactivated, all activated and both in combination with a plugin you specifically choose.

The only thing you need to do for it to work properly is manually add a file in your mu-plugins folder and after that it’s really easy to use. Choose which plugin you want to check and how many test-runs you’d like and let it do it’s work. Kinda like magic.

I don’t know how accurate the results are and what exactly is going on under the hood to measure them, but i’m sure it’s a good indicator if something is going wrong with a plugin.

What do you use to check Plugin Performance before installing/activating?

WordPress Plugin Profiler

Web Design Stack

April 28, 2015

A nice collection of resources and Cheat Sheets on many different aspects of web design. I already found something interesting in there: Sauce Labs, which could be a cheaper alternative to my (fairly underused) BrowserStack Account.

Web Design Stack

Redsgned

April 27, 2015

I know i know. Unsolicited redesign concepts have been reason for many discussions. Some like them, some hate them and Dribbble is full of them. I for my part think it can be a fun exercise to do and also a good source of inspiration for others.

Redsgned is a website showcasing the very best redesigns they find across the web, from web designs, branding, app designs, UI/GUI and product design.

Redsgned

Yoda Conditions

April 25, 2015

Have you ever heard of Yoda Conditions? Maybe you saw some code written like this:

if ( true == $the_force ) {
    $victorious = you_will( $be );
}

I never really got why it could be useful to write a condition in that order until i found this part of the WordPress’s PHP Coding Standards:

In the above example, if you omit an equals sign (admit it, it happens even to the most seasoned of us), you’ll get a parse error, because you can’t assign to a constant like true. If the statement were the other way around ( $the_force = true ), the assignment would be perfectly valid, returning 1, causing the if statement to evaluate to true, and you could be chasing that bug for a while.

Now that makes a whole lot of sense, so make sure to write your conditions in that order from now on, even if it sounds strange at first. Or, as it is appropriately stated in the Coding Standards:

A little bizarre, it is, to read. Get used to it, you will.

PHP Coding Standards – Yoda Conditions

The Knife Maker

April 23, 2015

A shortfilm about a writer from Brooklyn who found his thing in handcrafted knife making. A very inspiring story!

In our second film, we meet writer turned knife maker Joel Bukiewicz of Cut Brooklyn. He talks about the human element of craft, and the potential for a skill to mature into an art. And in sharing his story, he alights on the real meaning of handmade—a movement whose riches are measured in people, not cash.

Made by Hand / No 2 The Knife Maker