Category: Blog
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How can I use Feature Switches in WordPress
While a colleague and I were discussing the rollout of a new feature to our public facing website, he asked me if it would be possible to “hide” the new content behind a toggle. Effectively, he was asking me to write a feature switch, a best practice of continuous integration that allows you to push…
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How to Maybe Flush WordPress’s Rewrite Rules
Custom post types and taxonomies are one of the most powerful tools to transform WordPress from a blogging platform to a full CMS. One of the most common problems beginning developers have when starting to use them is understanding how they work. It’s easy to think that calling register_post_type is all it takes only to…
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How can I do Browser Testing With WordPress
Browser testing is a basic component of a concept called behavior driven development (BDD), and one that has helped me become a better WordPress developer in the last few months. The concept of BDD is simple: test and develop around your software’s expected behavior. I recently wrote about BDD for Excella’s company blog, and this…
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How to Explain Git to Non-Developers
Since starting with Excella in January I’ve found myself explaining git and the underlying concept of version control to a lot of non-developers. People like to ask me what I’m doing at my job, what I’m learning, and git was a big one I had to learn early on. What I usually focus on when…
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A week into Octopress
About a week ago I successfully migrated some of my posts from harmsboone.org to this blog, I also wrote a post about some things I learned about git that week. WordPress is great. I wouldn’t recommend it (and I almost always do) if it weren’t. For someone who wants to spin up a blog and…
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What I learned about git this week
I love hidden features in software. Whether it’s finding a konami code in unexpected places or that I can add or remove all the dots and underscores to my gmail address I want and I’ll still get the emails, something about them are great. That was what made Zach Holman’s presentation ‘More Git & GitHub…
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Tussle over Technology: Controversy & the Patent Act
Abstract The United States Constitution instructed the First Congress of the United States to enact laws “securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” This instruction, commonly referred to as the Intellectual Property Clause, demanded a set of laws based on the broad idea that inventors…
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20 Years of Gustavus: A bird’s eye view
Inspired by the Google Earth Time Machine blog highlighted by Kottke.org a few days ago, I decided to see how far back the imagery over my college campus reached. I figured it being in rural area, there was probably a lot of agricultural aerial photography going on, but I was wrong, the imagery only went…
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The Soft Power of Online Diplomacy
Abstract The age of the state is not over. Though some have written about the power of web 2.0 to topple regimes and destroy state sovereignty, the picture is a little more complicated. The Republic of Korea in the last two decades has taken on a major cultural export campaign. Led by television dramas and…
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Wherein a Northfield Game Inspired A Lesson Plan
People who came of age in the State of Minnesota sometime in the last decade likely have heard of Tricadecathlonomania, particularly those of us who know someone Northfield. For anyone who hasn’t heard of it, Trica, as it’s commonly known, is a scavenger hunt of epic proportion. It is not the scavenger hunt where you…