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My daughter brought home a letter and order form from school this week, promoting a company that allows you to have your child’s drawing added to various Christmas items – cards, tags, that kind of thing.
Except, in my opinion, it’s a perfect example of how to put up so many barriers and make things so complex that you’re just going to lose sales.
Continue reading “Putting up barriers to selling through rules and complexity”I’ve been using svnX for years now for managing my WordPress plugins with the svn repositories that WordPress.org provide. It’s pretty old-school and I keep intending to move to Versions but, yeah, time always seems to be against me.
However, I’ve now started getting the following errors against all my repos…
Continue reading “svn: “Server SSL certificate verification failed: issuer is not trusted””svn: E230001: Server SSL certificate verification failed: issuer is not trusted
When I was 12 I got my first computer – a Commodore 64. I remember talking to my Gran about it and saying how it was easy enough to use, even she could. She shook her said and said, “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks”. In her 80s, she never did, but neither did she try.
And a recent comment in a forum, on the subject of WordPress Gutenberg, reminded me of this.
Continue reading “Age and mental nihilism – rejecting change in older age”Update: I’ve now reverted back to my previous theme. Twenty Nineteen had too many issues present for me to continue using it (it was the first, very draft release, after all). Everything I saw has been reported though and I’m looking forward to using it a later time.
Just 3 hours ago (at the time of writing), the new theme for WordPress 5.0 was announced – Twenty Nineteen. And I’m running the very early version on this site.
Designed specifically for Gutenberg, it looks great but, yeah, some if it has broken the site (you don’t need to tell me).
Continue reading “Work on WordPress theme Twenty Nineteen has started – doesn’t it look pretty?”I recently discussed the idea of a micro-sabbatical – a short time off work where, rather than lay in bed, I use my time for family and self-improvement.
Left to my own devices on a day off, I’d probably have a lie-in before watching far too much daytime TV and then even indulging in a movie for the afternoon. By the end of the week I’ll feel that I hadn’t achieved anything. So, I set myself a specific schedule for each day to ensure I had something to do at each point, yet something I wanted to be doing.
Continue reading “My first micro-sabbatical”I may have developing on the WordPress platform for 11 years but, as yet, I haven’t been a speaker at a WordCamp. In fact, other than at work, internally, I’ve never given a talk on WordPress at all. So, it’s with some relief that I can announce that I will “pop my cherry” next month, as I’m announced as a speaker at WordCamp Edinburgh.
But there’s a little story behind it (ssshhh, don’t tell the organisers).
Continue reading “It’s official – I’ll be speaking at WordCamp Edinburgh next month”Yes, I “main” Bastion. And, by that, I mean it’s my principal character (by a long way – 81 out of 102 hours played, at the time of writing this).
But a lot of players feel he’s overpowered and only used by “noobs”. The lack of Bastion players in competitive eSports is cited as a demonstration of this. Combine that with the often toxic environment of gaming and he can make passions run high.
Continue reading “Overwatch: The life of a Bastion main”Unlike so many of the articles on the subject of Gutenberg, I’m not going to review it. I’ve run it on my site for some time and think it’s great. As a non-JS (okay, I know a little) developer, it’s going to be a steep hill to convert my plugins but as a user, I think it’s an amazing improvement.
No, I want to talk about some of the toxicity in the community and discuss some of the conspiracy theories that accompanies this.
Continue reading “Can we talk about Gutenberg and some of the toxic elements of the community?”The brand-new Apple Watch 4 came out yesterday, so users of older models may be considering using Apple’s Giveback scheme to get some money towards the new one. But, certainly in the UK, this doesn’t work quite as well as you’d hope.
Continue reading “Why Apple’s Giveback scheme isn’t as convenient as you’d think”Most people add useful code snippets to their WordPress site using their theme’s functions.php file – simply add the code to the end and all is good. But there are a number of downsides to this solution which can be simply cured by converting them to a plugin. Let me explain why and how you can do this.
