artiss.blog

Category: Development

  • Björk WordPress Theme: Violently Happy

    Björk WordPress Theme: Violently Happy

    I’ve used themes by Anders Norén before. They’re extremely well made and always free, with no missing features that you need to pay extra for.

    One of his more recent ones is Björk – a simple, clean and fast block theme intended for blogs and personal websites. Most importantly, for me, is that it makes use of Full Site Editing (FSE), something I’ve never played with before. And it was really time for me to do so.

    Hence, I’m now using this very theme on this site. I hope you like the change.

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  • WCEU 2023: Speaking in Athens

    WCEU 2023: Speaking in Athens

    If I could wrap my planning for WCEU 2023 into one word it would be “chaotic”. And when it comes to travel, that’s not normally what I’m like.

    The last couple of months have been hard – physically and mentally. And, as a result, I’d put WCEU to one side and, as a result, I didn’t do a lot of things I should have. Thankfully, my people network, and a lot of luck, got me through.

    Which was lucky, as I wasn’t just attending, but speaking.

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  • Hello Dolly. Revisited.

    Hello Dolly. Revisited.

    The plugin Hello Dolly comes bundled with every WordPress installation and adds a line of the famous to the top of the WordPress dashboard. And it’s not always appreciated.

    This is the most useless plugin ever created

    Why???

    For The Love of GOD, Why is this STILL on the Repo?

    …are just 3 of the 1 star reviews for it.

    Why is it included? Well, it’s not basically Matt wants everyone to learn the lyrics to one of his favourite songs. No, it’s included as an example of a basic plugin and how anyone can write one. It’s a demo.

    But it’s been in the plugin directory for 15 years and probably existed for even longer, with no real updates during this time. And, as a demonstration, it’s now out-of-date. As an example of how to write a plugin, it’s no longer doing its job.

    So, as a mini personal project, I’ve decided to bring Hello Dolly up to date. Sadly, I can’t make people love it.

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  • WordCamp Europe 2023

    WordCamp Europe 2023

    WCEU is just a few weeks away, this time coming from the beautiful city of Athens.

    And, assuming it doesn’t put you off, I’ll be one of the speakers. My talk has the title of “10 Things WordPress Plugin Developers Should Avoid”. I promise it’s less click-baity than the title suggests.

    Tickets are still available.

  • CSS compression script: now open source

    CSS compression script: now open source

    Back in 2008 I released an online tool (which was a simple page on this site) for CSS compression. You pasted in your CSS, pressed a button and it compressed it.

    However, I never really did much else with it – either improving what it did and what functions it provided, but also promoting it.

    Now, I’ve taken the original compression script and open sourced it for everyone to copy, fork, or just generally use.

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