Learning out Loud in Milwaukee, WI
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Minnesota: The north shore, a giant lake, and a lighthouse
Wedding Week part two began with a drive from Madison to Minneapolis followed by another drive in the morning from Minneapolis to Castle Danger, an “unincorporated community in Silver Creek Township, MN”, nestled along the shore of the world’s largest freshwater lake, Lake Superior.(1) Silver Creek is a short drive north from Two Harbors, MN where we stopped…
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Wisconsin: Mud races, free ferries, and small towns
The first day of Wedding Weekend brought us to Parfrey’s Glen State Natural Area in Southern Wisconsin, the first stop on our Saturday tour. Here, a section of The Ice Age Trail follows a creek bed that has carved a beautiful, fertile canyon that eventually brings hikers to Devil’s Lake. In 2008 a major flood washed out…
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An open letter to a certain DC driver
This is just to say, You’re right. I did turn left onto N St. from 11th St. NW yesterday. It was not even 8:00 in the morning but there I was, on Brooks Saddle attached to my Surly frame, riding comfortably in the bike lane until about a block before my turn when, signaling as…
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JSON Resume
A couple years ago my brother turned me on to LaTeX for writing and publishing documents. He’s a math guy and used it for just about everything he did. I’m not sure if he had a working copy of Microsoft Word on his computer, but he definitely had an updated MacTeX. I loved the What You See Is…
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My First Django Project!
It’s no secret that I’m getting married in August. When the time came to build a wedding website, I saw it as an opportunity to try something new. That opportunity: build my first Django project. Prior to this project I had really only worked with WordPress and static site generators. That was fine if all I…
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Flannel: A Python Project
I’m a big fan of learning new things in programming. It’s part of why I tried running this blog on a static site generator only to get scared back onto WordPress, and why I’ll probably give SSGs another shot before swearing them off completely. I recently had the opportunity to work on a project in Python for work…
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How can I Configure WordPress to Handle Dynamic Hostnames?
An increasingly common problem enterprise-level WordPress installations will face is how they handle build, staging, and production environments where IP addresses inside a VPN use a different hostname to access the same server as those outside the VPN. In this case, the wp-config.php file is a little more complicated than in the famous 5-minute install.…
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Markdown: It’s not for everyone
Interesting perspective from Tom McFarlin on Markdown as a choice, not a default. He gets at an underlying issue of my struggle to fully adopt a static site blog where Markdown, with HTML as a fallback, is the default mode of entry.
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Writing Integration tests in WordPress
Integration testing, like unit testing, is a best practice with the goal of evaluating a piece of software’s ability to interface with the rest of a system. Earlier I elaborated on the distinction between integration and unit testing and I won’t repeat myself here. Instead I’ll briefly expand our definition of integration test and demonstrate how to…
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Using Composer to Manage a WordPress Installation
The team at Roots.io have a fantastic walkthrough of Composer and why and how you should use it in managing a WordPress site. Composer is a wonderful piece of technology that reduces the headache of figuring out how to managing the individual components of your site to a single file and software solution. With WordPress,…
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Octopress: Six Months Later
When I was a week into this blog, I wrote down some of the reasons I liked Octopress, my initial impressions of it as a blogging platform and whether it could compete or replace WordPress. It was a leap for me, a WordPress developer and long time fan of the platform. In general I have…
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How can I use PHP Namespaces in WordPress Plugins
PHP has long had a problem of naming collisions. Because older versions of PHP had no way of declaring methods outside the global space, developers came up with several different ways of preventing and checking for namespace collisions, none of which treated the underlying condition. These many and varied solutions begged for a unifying standard…