Cloud Confusing
Explaining hosting, AWS, Wordpress, static sites, and all manner of cloud solutions.
WordPress DateTime Deep Dive
Recently, while working on the next version of the Post Expiration Date WP plugin, I’ve spent a lot of time exploring WordPress’ handling of dates and time. This has been an interesting, often frustrating time but I’ve learned a lot and found a number of great resources on the subject. Here are some of the top ones.
Sal January 21st, 2019
Posted In: Web Development
Working with APIs: Postman Pre-Request Scripts and Environmental Variables
This article will cover some of the initial features you should learn how to use once you get past the absolute basics of Postman. It’s a super useful tool for developments, QA, data scientists, and product managers, so it’s worth digging into. In this article we’ll bypass the basics and get into some of what you’ll want to learn as you dig into the tool.
Sal November 4th, 2018
Posted In: Web Development
The Pitfalls of Cheap WordPress Hosting
In the market for budget WordPress hosting? The competition for your business is immense, but that doesn’t mean you — as a consumer — will benefit in the end. The hosting business is largely a race-to-the-bottom where price sensitivity has overtaken user experience. Any buyer must go into the purchase in a defensive mindset, with the full expectation that budget hosting is going to come with a few serious catches. This doesn’t mean you need to spend $35 a month to host a WordPress site, but go into the buying decision with your eyes open.
Sal September 8th, 2018
Posted In: Web Development
Tags: Shared Hosting, Wordpress
Need to Unpublish an Article? WordPress Post Expiration Plugin
WordPress is great at scheduling articles (posts) to go live, but what if you want to do the opposite — schedule a post to disappear? For that you need an expiration plugin.
Sal August 21st, 2018
Posted In: Web Development
Tags: Content Management, Wordpress
How To Track Affiliate Link Clicks with Google Tag Manager
If you want to track clicks out of your site but you don’t own the page that is being linked to, it might not be immediately obvious how you can learn about your outgoing clicks. Some partners offer a conversion mechanism (a conversion pixel, callback, etc.) but many don’t. Plus not every click results in a conversion so keeping track of the people who are clicking out of your site can make a lot of sense. But how do you do it?
Don’t worry: tracking affiliate links clicks (or any other click on your site) is super easy and free.
Sal August 10th, 2018
Posted In: Web Development
Tags: Affiliate Marketing, Google Tag Manager, GTM
What is WordPress Gutenberg? And How Do I Get My Old Editor Back?
Have you heard the term “WordPress Gutenberg” thrown around lately and had little to no idea what it means? Don’t worry about it, there’s a fix for that.
Sal August 3rd, 2018
Posted In: Web Development
Tags: Gutenberg, Text Editors, Wordpress
Beyond Nothing: A Minimalist Hugo Theme
If you have been exploring the world of content management and/or static websites then you have almost certainly heard of Hugo. If not, or if you could use a refresher, Hugo is a static site generator built in Go that can easily and efficiently be used to build out multi-page websites. It’s similar to Jekyll (Ruby), Next (React), and any number of other tools. I’ve found Hugo to be particularly fun to learn and easy to use.
Sal July 24th, 2018
Posted In: Web Development
Tags: Hugo, Static Site Generator, Static Website
What’s The Best Stack for a Side Project?
There was a great question over at Hacker News recently that caught my attention: What’s your favorite way of getting a web app up quickly in 2018? Or, in other words, what is your preferred stack for quickly spinning up a side project? Having given the subject a lot of thought in the past I found the responses (over 500) to be of great interest.
The thread is worth a read, but it’ll take some time to get through. In an effort to (collectively) save time I wanted to summary the takeaways. This is not an exhaustive list, just my takeaways based on a thorough read of the comments. And, yes, this is a obvious over-simplication and the below categories are somewhat arbitrary but I still think there is value in summarizing the entire (quite messy) set of responses.
Sal June 4th, 2018
Posted In: Web Development
Tags: Django, Firebase, Flask, Heroku, React, Ruby on Rails, Side Projects