October has been manic and I’ve been down on my content-production. Here’s a quick summary in projects, posts and pins!
Projects: what I’ve been up to
- General WordPress project work: tweaks to recently completed projects, starting off some new smaller projects, and working on a slight re-design of a site that I made that is for a project that’s having a bit of a re-launch.
- Support and tweaks to a WordPress + LearnDash website. This has involved adding some security, debugging ReCAPTCHA’s, and making some nicer forms.
- Dealing with a seemingly-targetted hack on a prominent website that I help look after. The hosting company spent a lot of time on this with us and I’m very grateful for their help. We eventually decided it was safe to roll back to a backup of the site, but we lost a few days of data and I’ve been working through TWO backed up copies of the database to piece together important, missing data, line-by-line. This has actually set me back a couple of days and I’m still running a bit behind.
- Dealing with another issue that looked like a possible hack, but turned out to be a client’s hosting company (no names!) doing something they shouldn’t have without telling us.
Posts: things I made
- Beat the Street – tinkering with a virtual version of the game – how I started making a “virtual” version of a fantastic geocaching/letterboxing type game that’s running in my home town for a few weeks. Includes GPS and trigonometry!
- One does not simply log into WordPress and build a form – a satirical, but hopefully informative look at what questions you need to ask when building a form
- VIDEO: Command Line/Terminal basics 1: Getting started and finding how commands work with ‘man’ – this was supposed to be a little series, but I started it JUST before the important website got hacked. I will continue it this week!
Pins: things I read and remembered
- Welcome to Botwiki | Botwiki – A catalogue of bots and bot tech. I’m a bit into bots, so this is useful.
- How much screen time is too much for kids? It’s complicated – this is slightly old, but has been very relevant to family life
- Kampa Trucker Trolley – there’s a new Aldi supermarket opening, LITERALLY, at the end of our road, so I’ve been looking at trolleys like this. This one looks particularly good.
- Don’t Get Distracted – Caleb Thompson’s story of finding responsibility through building software that kills people
- WordPress Database Upgrade Phishing Campaign – as if I haven’t had enough of bad actors this week, this seemed like a phising scam worth being aware of
- More than half of consumers prefer businesses that have chat apps – as I said, I’m into bots, so this is good collateral for arguing for the use of chat systems…maybe.
- ColorBox by Lyft Design – cool design tool for producing colour sets (WITH A ‘U’!)
- Inter UI font family – nice open-source sans-serif font family for use in apps and UI’s
- Laravel Shift – Shifty Coders Community – a nice new Slack community that I’ve come across, via @javorszky!
- Ferret: Declarative web scraping – a tool/language for querying HTML files for data. I do this when doing migrations sometimes. This may be a helpful tool!
- Form: A free wireframe kit – pretty boring, but nice wireframing kit from the excellent folks at InVision
- Technical overview of Gutenberg integration – the WordPress core team explain how all the moving parts of Gutenberg fit together – useful!
- What Happens When You Create A Flexbox Flex Container? – I finally started reading this excellent primer on how Flexbox works – it’s great.
- Styling the Gutenberg Columns Block – Handy Gutenberg theming tips
- Let’s start building JavaScript plugins for WordPress – Riad explains his handy WordPress JavaScript plugin starter, that also acts as a tutorial on getting started building WordPress plugins with JavaScript
- Goodbye JavaScript, Hello WebAssembly – I’m not a fan of JavaScript, so I’m intrigued by the possibility of being able to compile other languages into WASM. This is a good brief overview
- CSS Only Floated Labels with :placeholder-shown pseudo class – Call Me Nick – what it says on the tin; a neat form UI trick!
- UTC is Enough for Everyone, Right? – an excellent, excellent overview of how complex dealing with time in computer code can be. Also via @javorszky
- Today I learned about MySQL and timezones – Gabor, himself, explains some issues he found dealing with timezones server-side
- Compass.js – turns out mobile browsers aren’t so keen to give up compass information. I might need this library for my Beat the Street clone!
Have a great week!