It’s been a few months since I’ve written about my weight loss efforts, but I’m proud to report that the progress continues. As of this morning, I’ve lost 46 pounds since June 2015, and I may yet reach my goal of losing a total of 60 by the first of June this year.
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This past weekend, my wife, her mother, and I took my daughter, Emily, to the far-off land of Indiana to meet some of her maternal relatives who have yet to be graced by her presence. Some are elderly and have difficulty with travel, while others have large families of their own making lodging a logistical nightmare. Regardless, this post isn’t about why we were traveling, just that we had a 4.5 hour drive with an infant just north of 7 months old.
Shit happens, and – in this case – literally.
Another week, another new plugin, it seems. This time, I’m proud to announce that McAvoy is now available in the WordPress.org repository!
McAvoy was born out of a client need to get information about what visitors are searching for on their site. While there are enterprise-level packages to do this and it’s pretty easy to set up in something like Google Analytics, our client wanted a solution that would simply collect information about what people were searching for and make it visible within the WordPress Admin dashboard.
I recently released Advanced Post Excerpt, a free plugin that replaces the standard WordPress “Post Excerpt” meta box (a plain textarea) with a stripped down TinyMCE editor instance. Finally, there’s no need for your authors to write HTML (or copy it out of the “Text” tab of the main editor); instead, they’re given the essentials for WYSIWYG text editing (bold, italic, link, etc.) and nothing more.
During SunshinePHP, I had the pleasure of sitting down and talking with Salvi Pascual of Miami non-profit Apretaste. Besides talking about the delicious desserts at the speakers’ dinner, Salvi and I chatted about the current state of internet connectivity outside of the United States. I hadn’t realized it before, but barely 90 miles from where we sat there lives a population where nearly three quarters of the people have no internet connectivity, and of those that do less than 4% have access to anything beyond email.
Imagine if you were living in 2016 with little-to-no access to the internet. No social media. No news from the outside world. No cat videos on YouTube.
I’ve been behind on announcing new projects, but I wanted to make sure I shared this one:WP404 is a framework for capturing additional information and details about WordPress 404 errors, packaged as a WordPress plugin.
The plugin was born out of a need to capture tricky, time-based 404s on a client site. I figured I could either throw something together quickly on the client’s dime or spend my lunchtime and evening building something the community could use. Guess who didn’t want a half-assed tool? ?
This past weekend, my Father-in-Law, Dave, and I set out on a journey: walk up High Street from where it intersects I-270 on the south side of Columbus (near Obetz) and finish in my hometown of Worthington, where 23 crosses 270 again on the north side. Grand total: 16.7 miles of conversation, good beer, and exploring the city I love.
Anyone who’s had to do code reviews on a team before can tell you that inconsistent coding standards add a lot of unnecessary noise to the review process. Even minor things like trailing whitespace, spaces v. tabs, code indentation, and whitespace (or lack thereof) around function declarations can cause merge conflicts and increase the time it takes to do a good code review.
Fortunately, coding standards are pretty easy to check, and there are great tools like PHP_CodeSniffer that can scan your codebase for issues with coding standards. WordPress has a well-defined set of coding standards, and there’s even a collection of PHP_CodeSniffer standards for WordPress. With Composer and a little bit of configuration we can check our coding standards, catch common security issues (missing input sanitization, output escaping, etc.), and even validate that everything’s well-documented.
We have the tools to write standards-compliant code, so now we just have to configure them and make them run automatically. That’s where my latest project comes in: I’m happy to announce WP Enforcer is available for your projects!
This year I’ll be participating in my second-ever Movember to raise funds and awareness for men’s health issues. You may recall I was the Captain of Buckeye Interactive’s grow team in 2013, and this year I’m helping lead the charge for 10up’s MoTeam!
For the uninitiated, Movember is an annual fundraiser wherein men – starting clean-shaven – grow mustaches over the month of November to raise awareness for men’s health issues. Along the way, we raise money to help fund research for prostate and testicular cancers and support programs promoting strong mental health and physical fitness.
As you may have heard, my wife and I had our first child, Emily, one month ago today. The last month has been full of ups and downs, sleepless nights and unthinkable joy. The diapers and spit up are manageable, but the sleep has been the hardest.
Imagine this: you’re holding your newborn in your arms, gently patting her back until she drifts off to sleep. After ten or twenty minutes, she finally dozes off, and you slowly creep over to her crib to put her down. As soon as her head touches the mattress, she stirs, letting out a howl. Quickly, you reach for the pacifier to try to soothe this beast whom with cannot be reasoned, and the peaceful bliss of infant slumber resumes. You stumble back to the plush nursery armchair, hopeful to get at least a few minutes of peace before you head off to bed, when the gentle suckling of the pacifier stops; you brace yourself for what comes next: the blood-curdling scream of the child when she realizes the pacifier has fallen out of her mouth.
