artiss.blog

Category: Life

Random thoughts on life

  • Going electric. Nearly.

    Going electric. Nearly.

    I was due to replace my car early next year, and I’ve been looking at plug-in hybrids (PHEV). The cost and range anxiety of a full EV was always something that put me off, which is why the PHEV was the perfect solution.

    I’d been looking for a while, online, at the options but was dismayed at the high costs or, where it wasn’t so expensive, the massive compromise.

    And then I came across the recently released Mazda MX-30 R-EV. I went for a test drive, read the reviews and, days later, bought one. Why now? They have some fantastic offers, inc. a big chuck off the price.

    So, how’s it gone?

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  • extract() usage is highly discouraged

    extract() usage is highly discouraged

    In 2012, the much loved and much missed WordPress developer Alex Mills raised a WordPress Trac ticket…

    extract() is a terrible function that makes code harder to debug and harder to understand. We should discourage it’s use and remove all of our uses of it.

    As a result, use of the PHP functions was removed from WordPress and was added to the coding standards (which, in turn, made it into the WordPress sniffs for PHPCS).

    But why, and what should we do instead?

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  • ShareOpenly: Now for WordPress

    ShareOpenly: Now for WordPress

    Ben Werdmuller, a developer and startup founder, has recently launched ShareOpenly, a method of adding sharing links to your website content but for the modern, open, social web.

    You know all those “share to Facebook” / “share to Twitter” links you see all over peoples’ websites? They’re all out of date.

    Social media has evolved over the last year, yet nobody has “share to” links for Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads, etc. There have been a few attempts to create “share to Mastodon” buttons, but they haven’t taken the larger breadth of the new social media landscape into account.

    So I’ve built a prototype, which I’ve called ShareOpenly.

    ShareOpenly announcement

    Now, a WordPress plugin is available to add this feature quickly and easy to your site. Indeed, scroll down to the bottom of this post and you’ll see it in action!

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  • Please don’t buy any Google Nest products

    Please don’t buy any Google Nest products

    I have a house full of Google Nest products, adding a video doorbell to my collection only last year. And, yet, I would no longer recommend them and will be looking to find alternatives as my existing products need replacing.

    Why? Well, it’s the usual thing of not being able to trust Google to just stop supporting your pricey bit of kit.

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  • Why is changing your email address so tricky for some websites? Part 2

    Why is changing your email address so tricky for some websites? Part 2

    A few years ago, I wrote about my issues updating my email address with some website.

    Now, a secondary problem has come to light, and all within a few weeks – despite some website allowing me to change my email, they’re retaining my old one in their system and using that for important emails. Let me explain.

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