Development Archives

  1. Disable Submit Button After a Form is Submitted

    Once a user has submitted a form, you generally don’t want them to submit it a second time.1 A nice way to handle this is to disable the submit button once the form has been submitted, while replacing the text in the submit button with a message to let the user know that their desired…

  2. We’ve Made Web Development Complicated

    When I first made my transition from front-end development into back-end development in ~2002, I had two things to learn: a server-side language how to talk to a database (SQL) on top of my knowledge of HTML, CSS and JavaScript. With these five basic things, I was able to build some useful stuff. I’m working…

  3. Sane Laravel 5 Mail Example

    For some reason, the example code in the Laravel docs for their Mail feature neglect to show how to pass defined variables into the closure. Here is something a little more useful. View the code on Gist.

  4. Setting the wp_remote_get() User Agent

    I was recently trying to make some API requests from within WordPress using `wp_remote_get()`, but the site I was asking for data from was rejecting requests from the default WordPress User Agent. I tried to set the user agent to something different, but it still wasn’t working: $response = wp_remote_get($url, array(   ‘timeout’ => 20,   ‘User-Agent’…

  5. Local *.dev and *.app via Dnsmasq on Mac OS X

    I am in the process of setting up a development environment on a new machine and one of the things I decided to do is route all .dev domains to my local (built-in) Apache web server while I route all .app domains to my Laravel Homestead Vagrant environment. To never have to monkey with your…

  6. The Race to the Bottom Benefits Platforms (not Developers)

    There’s been a ton of recent conversation in the iOS world about the inability for most indie developers to create sustainable businesses through the iOS app store. In particular, these devs are talking about apps that require larger development efforts – they want to charge more than “impulse purchase” prices for these, and thus want…

  7. Custom Taxonomy as “Post Meta”

    I found this post while sorting through my old drafts and decided to go ahead and publish it rather than trashing it. Hopefully the code samples don’t break too badly in WordPress 3.9. I’ve talked a bit about when to use custom taxonomies and when to use custom fields/post meta (and how they can be…

  8. Text Editors

    Yesterday I watched a colleague’s Sublime Text 2 crash repeatedly as he tried to navigate the search results in a large project. BBEdit‘s search (and edit in the results window) feature is a part of my normal development process. I think it crashed on me once about 8 years ago.

  9. HTML5 Colorado Flag T-shirt

    co-html5

    A couple of years ago I got some Colorado State flag HTML5 t-shirts printed up.1 Since then, a number of folks have asked about getting them so I set up a TeeSpring. They will be on sale in mens and womens sizes for $15 for the next 2 weeks. We need 50 orders for them…

  10. That Wasn’t on the Schedule

    On Tuesday I was back in the office and itching to get back to work on my current project. That morning I got two emails about an incompatibility in Carrington Build‘s Rich Text module and WordPress 3.9. Sure enough, the change in WordPress core to upgrade to TinyMCE 4.0 coupled with changes in how TinyMCE…

  11. Work Backwards

    Relating to yesterday’s post on inertia, I wanted to pass on another nugget I’ve learned about how to approach and define problems: working backwards. I’ve found this to be useful in both technical and business situations and I use it all the time. Basically, start with the end result you want, and figure out how…

  12. Is WordPress the Right Tool for the Job?

    I recently got an email that asked: Do you ever question whether WordPress is the correct CMS for something? I am a big WordPress fan too and I’ve solved some really cool content management challenges with it but there are times when I think, this site would probably be faster and more efficient if it…