Programmers can spend a lot of time worrying about, thinking about, and optimizing the way that the code they’re writing looks. Whether it’s language designers obsessing about the way that you’ll find the length of string or language-users sweating about whether the function should be called findClassById() or get_class(), all thinking about naming is arguably […]
We do a lot of PHP work here at Press Up. Not only do we do WordPress, but we use the language on its own for many small projects, and we’ve run more than a few projects built atop of other PHP packages, libraries, and frameworks. PHP is the ugly step-child that every programmer loves to hate, […]
404 is the HTTP “Not Found” error code. When a web application receives a request for a resource or page it can’t make sense of, it should return a 404 error and a page that corresponds to that error. You’ve almost certainly seen a 404 page in your life, and you’ll probably see tons more. […]
With a few notable exceptions, software makers hate dealing with preexisting code. Sure, they’re happy to have tools that solve problems they have, but give them a bunch of code that “mostly solved” an existing problem or the opportunity to start over from scratch, and many would blindly pick starting over from scratch. Easy-to-work-with software […]
There are a few commonly-known password sins, in rough order of how I think most people think of them: Writing down your password. Telling someone else your password. Reusing a password. Of these, many people — myself included — were historically led to think that the first is the worst. Back in the old days, […]
One of the most interesting things that I didn’t understand before I really spent much time learning about computers is how passwords work. It seems kind of stupid, but it’s an interesting and important question: how is a site validating that you’re you? The Naivest Possible Password System Well, pretty simply, you can make a […]
PHP is a strange and (let’s get it over with) ugly, little language. It’s not exceptionally fast. It’s not beautiful syntactically. It’s not formulated around a clear opinion. And it’s still what I write a lot of software in. The obvious question is: why? Well, It’s EVERYWHERE… There are a lot of reasons to know […]
“What’s an API?” is one of those questions that is really powerful, important, and interesting, but hadn’t crossed my mind in a while. Programmers talk about APIs all the time, and increasingly it’s a term that non-programmers will have heard at some point. But what exactly one is is a rich and interesting question. Application […]
A few thing are true about this topic. First, you can draw (make images) with PHP. Second, only a sadist would try to replace a Photoshop-like tool with any programming interface to a drawing tool. Third, the GD image library for drawing in PHP has many drawbacks. Those drawbacks are pretty significant, though some of […]
I found some time over the recent holidays to update our free and simple Required Featured Image plugin. So I’m excited to tell you about an important new feature: it now works for Posts, Pages, and custom post types. (Relevantly, I just wrote a post at WPShout about how and why you’d use custom post […]
Metric time is one of those ideas I just naturally think about from time to time. Time is such a strange system: there are 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day, 365 days in (most) years, but not every fourth, but yes if it’s a multiple of […]
The Thanksgiving holiday is tomorrow in the US, and I thought it made sense to take some time to reflect on some of my favorite tools this year. Most of these are one’s I’ve used for a while and still love intensely. Some are new, but I imagine I’ll use them for years to come. […]
