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The Importance of HTML
In 1917, the artist Michael Duchamp submitted his work, “Fountain” to an art exhibition. It’s a used urinal. And it stirred up yet another conversation about, “What is art?” I’ve only taken one art history class, so forgive my simplification here. Essentially, art is subjective. If you personally don’t like Duchamp’s urinal, it doesn’t make…
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Why I’m Using a Site I Didn’t Code
I make websites for a living. I’ve made hundreds of custom sites. But not this one. I think I’m on iteration 4 of my portfolio site. Every 3 years or so I’ll take the time to switch it up. I did that again last week, but instead of redesigning and recoding my site by hand…
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Shoulder Health for Developers
At my first team meetup for Automattic, I gave a flash talk on shoulder health. I’m the only US-born person on my team, and they made sure to point out how American this disclaimer is, but here it is anyways: I’m not a doctor. Don’t take this article as medical advice. These are things that…
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Taxonomy Queries with WordPress v2 REST API
In order to access posts by a taxonomy query via the v2 WP REST API, you’ll need to do a little set-up first. Let’s say we’re starting a beer blog, and we’re attaching two custom taxonomies to our posts: “styles” and “breweries”. Creating the Taxonomies When you register the taxonomy using register_taxonomy, you have to…
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Tutorial: How to Minify & Version a JS File with NPM Scripts
One of the studies with the Center for Media Engagement needed a straightforward way to maintain and deploy a single JS file. I didn’t want to use a big fancy WebPack or Gulp setup when all we needed was to minify and version a single JS file, so I turned to using npm scripts. tl;dr…
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WordPress Actions Made Simple
I was coding WordPress themes for an embarrassingly long time before I fully understood how to use WordPress actions. This is how I wish someone had explained them to me when I was beginning as a developer. I’m going to walk through this abstractly, not with actual WordPress hooks. The point of this article is…
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Basic HTML Boilerplate Structure
When you only create a new base template every few months (or longer!), it’s hard to remember the little details of the structure that you don’t touch often. As of HTML5, the <doctype>declaration and structure has gotten a lot easier, but it’s still easy to forget. Here’s the basics: Notes on Easily Forgotten Structural Tags…
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A Designer’s Response to Seth Godin’s “Working with a designer (four paths)”
In Seth Godin’s Working with a designer (four paths), he’s educating people on different things to have considered and come to terms with before approaching a designer. Go ahead and read his post if you haven’t before continuing here. It won’t take long. As a designer, I think he’s spot on about the (at least)…
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Switch WordPress Database based on Git Branch
I’m working on a large redesign project where lots of database changes are going to take place. In order to not mix-up the current master branch with the new redesign changes, I made a new database so I can keep things separate. The only trick is to remember to change out the database in wp-config.php…