Without question, the most common operation in the Web applications I build is retrieving gobs of structured data and displaying that data in some order. In most cases, the data comes from database tables. But not always. In this article, I share what I’ve found out about how one can use the array_multisort function to sort multidimensional arrays.
Techniques
Short How-To articles, similar to Case Studies but on a smaller scale.
Customizing WordPress Using Vendor-Built Child Themes
While the child theme method works well for many WordPress Web-site builds, sites based on vendor-built child themes require a different strategy. This article describes my current favorite approach and invites discussion on the topic.
How to add an About Us blurb to every WordPress blog post
While WordPress has functions and template tags for displaying “About the Author” information on single blog post pages (in fact, many themes innately support this), there’s nothing similar for displaying “About Us” information. This article offers a simple method for adding an “About Us” blurb after the main text of every single blog post. And I hope it gets your wheels turning about ways to add customized content to your WordPress Web site.
Underlining for Emphasis: How to un-underline text on a Web page with CSS
No matter how loudly and often we tell our clients who maintain their own Web sites (via WordPress and other CMS-driven platforms) that using underlining for emphasis on the Web is a very bad idea, many of them do it anyway. This article explains, first of all, why this practice is a bad idea, and then it offers a simple CSS solution for removing underlines that shouldn’t appear on Web pages.
Don’t use the admin username in WordPress
This screenshot should confirm that using the admin username in your WordPress installation is a bad idea.
One suggestion for writing blog articles that don’t suck
If you write, edit, or publish blog articles, you probably don’t wake up in the morning hoping your blog articles suck. But let’s face it: so many blog articles DO suck. In this short article, I’ll share my extremely simple and fundamental rule for writing blog articles that don’t suck. (If it weren’t for all the evidence to the contrary, this advice would be so obvious as to be unnecessary.)
Biting the bullet
Last night, while working on an online order form for a client, I faced the challenge of coding a validation routine for 30 free-form text fields that can only accept values that are measurements in inches and fractions of an inch. If this sounds geeky, I suppose it is. But this story is more about attitude than technology. Finding myself at a familiar crossroads (whether to stay in my comfort zone or step out — that is, whether to venture into the world of regular expressions), I bit the bullet and stepped out. I liked the taste. I don’t think you have to be a developer to find resonance in the moral of this story. At least I hope not.
About Post Formats in 12 Slides
Excellent introduction to Post Formats by Samuel Wood (Otto). Slides from his presentation to WordPress Memphis Meetup two years ago.
iPhone Video: Land, Front Up, Back Down.
Do you ever take videos with your iPhone and email them to friends? If so, are any of those friends on Windows?
Shorten Your WordPress Slugs (Permalinks)
When you post WordPress pages and blog articles, you don’t have to use the slug that WordPress automatically generates from the post title. In fact, there are some pretty good reasons NOT to use the default. This article explains the why and the how.