Author Archive | Ted Roche

The November meetup of the Seacoast WordPress Developers group had nine attendees. The discussions were far-ranging, with a lot of very useful information!

Before we got started, there was a discussion about creating custom archives, and Amanda brought up the codex page on archives: http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Hierarchy to point out the different templates that can build on archives.

WordCamp Boston 2013 was the main topic of the evening, and three regulars — Amanda, Laurel and Tina — shared a ride down to the Saturday sessions. New member Jim also attended and all were impressed with the organization of the event and the variety and professionalism of the presentations. Amanda noted that the meetings were recorded and should eventually appear on http://wordcamp.tv although this is likely a volunteer operation and may take some time.

We did a round of introductions: Amanda, Chris, the other Chris, Jim S. me, Jacqui (acdczone,com), Laurel, Phil, David. First meetups for Jim, Jacqui, and Phil. Welcome!

I mentioned there was a proposal for a meetup in Manchester to discuss collaborative teamwork. Tentative discussions. Caution we don’t want to step over the line and commit price fixing. But open to discussions on pricing, clients, functionality. Client engagements. Fixed-price v. time-and-materials.

Meanwhile, back at WordCamp: @beep – Ethan Marcotte keynote. Responsive Web Design. I mentioned that Ethan presented at many conferences, including my favorite An Event Apart and also wrote a book on responsive design with the affiliated group A Book Apart.

Laurel mentioned that one session on backups had a number of people enthused about VaultPress for WP backups. It’s written by the folks at Automattic, who also manage Akismet and WordPress.com. It’s commercial, starting at $5 a month, but may make sense for some people. (Later on, someone asked about how the profile pictures for WordCamp Boston were made. That’s Gravatar, yup, also an Automattic property.)

Chris Cochran made WordCamp presentation, – focused on content, web designer, bottom-up, content-out, Customizing to the user.

Amanda walked us through the excellent slides for Wicked Fast WordPress by Chris Ferdnandi https://speakerdeck.com/cferdinandi/wicked-fast-wordpress

Jetpack for Developers – George Stephanis — is a dev for JetPack and was pretty focused on writing JetPack.

jQuery and WordPress Together, Again — This was a bit of a suprise, based on the title. If you were expecting to learn about how to use jQuery inside WordPress. It was the inverse: how the jQuery team uses WordPress inside jQuery multiple websites.

PHP Unit Testing

Evolving your JavaScript with Backbone.js

Off on another tangent — I’m not complaining, just giving context — for a discussion about useful plugins: manage.wp for managing many sites, wordfence for security and akismet to block comment spam.

Questions on good books, tutorials, videos. Lots of suggestions. Me: Start at codex.wordpress.org

Question on managing booking time: Appointments Plus

Another on good, fast, efficient multi-faceted search, a term I hadn’t heard before: example given was to filter a large listing of homes by number of bedrooms. So the engine is not just full-text search, but name-value pairs out of custom posts.

Question on commerce sites: wpmu, WooCommerce, others.

Q on snaking columns, Woo Dojo and short columns.

Quick demo of Visual Composer. lets the end users do more layout.

And there was more! Tips, tricks, the solutions to your WordPress questions. But you have to attend, because I can’t possibly transcribe all that happened at the meeting. Great stuff.

Thanks to Josh Cyr, owner of AlphaLoft for providing the space for the meeting, and to Amanda Giles for organizing the meeting. Hope to see you all next month.

The ubiquitous figure with a shovel full of…

I snicker at the sight of a web page with a big “Under Construction” banner or the ubiquitous figure with a shovel. Of course the site is under construction. If a web page isn’t growing and changing, it’s a historical artifact and not a Living Web page.
I’m working at bringing my blog up to speed, after a year of benign neglect. While I’ve kept the software up-to-date, the postings have been infrequent, the template is showing its age, and the information has a good case of Internet bit-rot. I installed the Broken Link Checker plugin to assist with cleaning up the blog posts that point to nowhere, or worse, wrong-ware, and it’s a pretty Cool Tool. It plowed through a lot of posts and ferreted out missing (404) links, bad server responses, missing servers, redirects and more, and provided statistics that let me appreciate the scope of the work to do: in round numbers, there are 5000 links in 3000 posts, and 1000 of them are broken. Wow.
The Broken Link Checker lets you sort and triage the links: filter a set by urls, search-and-replace using regular expressions, update with the Web Archive link (it searches for it automatically, if you select ‘Update Link’). I found several of my favorite bloggers moved or re-mapped their blogs over the past decade (no surprise, there really), but didn’t leave redirects in place, so all my links to David Weinberger’s Hyperorg or Doc Searl’s blogs or Robert X. Cringely’s material on PBS.org ended in broken links. With the Broken Link Checker, I was able to pull up a list of all the broken links for one site, then work through the list while trolling the site in another window, and cutting-and-pasting updated links.
It wasn’t just the individual bloggers, though. Many (most?) of the media sites I cite —— ZDNet, Washington Post, etc. —— have also reworked their content URLs, leaving the blog orphaned.
There’s lots of one-off, one-hit wonders, too: the usual cool stuff that took the web by storm for 36 hours and then vanished back into the noise. Pretty much anyone I cited at their company’s “Who Are We” page has moved on and gotten a new job, or the company’s been absorbed by BigNamelessAmalgamates, Inc. The link is broken, but the history remains. Broken Link Checker has some nice options to remove the broken link while leaving the anchor text in place, with strike-through style showing there’s a change, and a title visible on mouse-over that shows the orphaned link. This seems like an ideal tool to curate old material.
There’s also a lesson to be learned in what’s useful blogging. A number of posts that were closer to bookmarks of “Look what Bob’s doing over there! Awesome!” are far less awesome, now that Bob’s site is long gone, and can’t even be found in the Wayback Machine. That’s a post with a value of zero or perhaps even null. So, in the future, we (that’s you and I, dear reader) should resolve to make our posts a little more useful should they be standing alone on a reinvented Internet in another ten years.

Thanks to the folks at Small Dog Electronics and their Barking’s blog for this post on using a 3rd party remote control with an Apple TV. I love the ATV remote, but it is the third or fourth remote we use on the entertainment center, and some days it’s impossible to keep them sorted. I’ll have to try this out.