A collection of useful .htaccess snippets by Phan An
February 11, 2015Phan An has collected this handy list of useful .htaccess snippets.
Bookmarked!
Measuring Responsive Breakpoint Usage
February 10, 2015Designing websites for a modern web means dealing with a whole lot of different setups, devices and resolutions and the best way to handle this is to build things as device agnostic as possible when planning our breakpoints. Wouldn’t it be nice, if tools like Google Analytics would let us track not only devices, but also the usage of our actual breakpoints? Well, turns out that’s possible with a clever use of matchMedia(), as Philip Walton from Google explains in his article.
If your site is built on device-less principles, but its usage is measured against device-only metrics, you’re going to get a mismatch—potentially a big one.
I’m looking forward to implement and play around with this somewhere.
Paul Graham on “How Not to Die” as a startup
February 9, 2015I really enjoyed reading this post by Paul Graham about “How Not to Die” as a startup. It’s the transcript of a talk he gave to a group of founders at a Y Combinators dinner in 2007 and he talked about all kinds of things startups are going through. And even though he described it as a “grim” talk himself, i found it to be more of a motivational piece than anything else.
I’m pretty sure he’s right when he says that a big portion of success is basically just “don’t give up”. Paired maybe with a bit of luck and a whole lot of flexibility and iteration. An idea alone almost never directly became a big hit without any form of transformation and the startups that made it are almost never the one’s that had the best and most original idea to begin with, but the one’s that tried harder and kept iterating instead of giving up.
Let me mention some things not to do. The number one thing not to do is other things. If you find yourself saying a sentence that ends with “but we’re going to keep working on the startup,” you are in big trouble. Bob’s going to grad school, but we’re going to keep working on the startup. We’re moving back to Minnesota, but we’re going to keep working on the startup. We’re taking on some consulting projects, but we’re going to keep working on the startup. You may as well just translate these to “we’re giving up on the startup, but we’re not willing to admit that to ourselves,” because that’s what it means most of the time. A startup is so hard that working on it can’t be preceded by “but.”
And also this next quote resonated with me and resembled some of the things i meant when i wrote about our goal to solving almost no one’s problem.
I like Paul Buchheit’s suggestion of trying to make something that at least someone really loves. As long as you’ve made something that a few users are ecstatic about, you’re on the right track. […]
So when you release something and it seems like no one cares, look more closely. Are there zero users who really love you, or is there at least some little group that does? It’s quite possible there will be zero. In that case, tweak your product and try again. Every one of you is working on a space that contains at least one winning permutation somewhere in it. If you just keep trying, you’ll find it.
In that sense: Let’s keep on trying, and have a good week!
Ged Palmer – Calligraphy & Lettering ’14
February 8, 2015Such a beautiful craft.
IE8 Linter
February 7, 2015A little tool to lint websites for IE8 compatibility, with warnings for possible pitfalls and suggested fixes.
I hope i will never have to support IE8 again. But if, this could come in handy.
Crowdsourced Code Snippet Libraries
February 6, 2015Pippin Williamson uses a GitHub repository as an open code snippets library which features all kinds of ways to customize the default behavior of Easy Digital Downloads. I really like that idea and think it’s well worth the effort. We should probably do something similar for picu as soon as it’s available, too.
– It’s a resource for the support team.
– It’s a source of examples for people wanting to customize behavior.
– It provides live testing (similar to add-on plugins) for potential features to add to core.
How a Crowdsourced Code Snippet Library Can Boost Your Open Source Project
WordPress Plugin – Raph
February 5, 2015The use of shortcodes in WordPress can often end up in a big mess when changing a theme or removing a plugin. Raph is a Plugin which let’s you convert shortcodes to HTML, right inside the editor. That way you can disable the plugin and still have the actual rendered output in your content, without the need for a shortcode.
Shortcodes may be useful, but rendering them “on the fly” can be a performance killer.
Moreover, shortcodes added by themes or by plugins, lock you in with those products, because you if you change theme or uninstall plugins that add shortcodes, your content will be bungled when not lost.
Have you ever desired get rid of a plugin, but can’t because of shorteds? Now you can.
I think this is actually a pretty smart idea! Check it out on GitHub.
Check for Plugins that are no longer in the Plugin Directory
February 4, 2015If a plugin gets pulled from the official plugin directory on WordPress.org there could be several reasons for that. Could be that it just became obsolete when a new version of WordPress introduced the features it provided, could be that the developer just stopped developing it, but it could have also been deleted because serious security issues were detected with the plugin. No matter what the reason was, it means you no longer get update notifications and could potentially run into security risks later on.
Today i discovered this little plugin which checks for plugins no longer in the directory and tested it on a local copy of a client site. In addition to removed plugins it also displays if a plugin wasn’t updated in more than two years, which is also nice to know. Keep in mind that this doesn’t give you perfect safety, a plugin can still be in the directory and be outdated or insecure. But if it was removed it’s definitely a good idea to investigate further and to check for alternatives.
The database table prefix is not a security feature
February 3, 2015There’s a common believe that changing the wp_ prefix of your WordPress database tables will protect your website. Turns out that’s just a myth.
The WordPress community is large enough to develop its own myths. One of them is about the database table prefix, the variable $table_prefix that you set in your wp-config.php. It goes like this:
“Change the default prefix to something that is hard to guess. That will protect your website against attackers.”
Well … no. That’s nonsense. Security theater. A waste of time.
Thomas Scholz further explains why in this article.
Yeo – Secret Powers (feat. Yule Post)
February 2, 2015Some music to start the week.