Tag: wordpress

  • Three key takeaways from FinCon 2024

    A few NerdPress team members sponsored/exhibited at FinCon 2024 in Atlanta, Georgia this past week and I thought I’d distill the numerous conversations I had with attendees, speakers, and sponsors into three key takeaways. Visiting Atlanta in fall is… very warm! It was nice to be downtown and see the FinCon audience be so enthusiastic…

    Continue >

  • Thoughts on Automattic vs. WP Engine

    In this post, I’m sharing my personal thoughts on the Automattic vs. WP Engine trademark dispute. These views are my own and may not reflect those of my employer or anyone else on my team. Additionally, this should not be seen as a comprehensive retelling of the events from the past few weeks. Much has…

    Continue >

  • Hiding container elements based on the state of the Modified Date block in WordPress using CSS

    On my single post template I like to show the date the post was most recently modified to make it clear that it had been edited since it was first published. I also do this on my portfolio entries – which you can see on my Where I series of photographs on the bottom left-hand…

    Continue >

  • Diversions #2: From Chicago to Assateague

    Diversions is the central hub for news about the membership, behind-the-scenes details of my personal projects, as well as a wide variety of links to people, places, and things that inspire me. Chitown! I spent a few unseasonably warm days in Chicago on a work trip with the NerdPress team. It was my first time meeting…

    Continue >

  • Favorite Toots now available on the WordPress plugin directory

    Back in early February I submitted the Favorite Toots WordPress plugin I had been toying with on my own website to the WordPress plugin directory. Starting today, it is available publicly there and people can search for it from their own WordPress Admins. The source code is available on GitHub if you’d like to contribute…

    Continue >

  • The first rebuilding blocks

    Korczak Ziolkowski wakes up early on a bitter cold winter’s morning – the same way he has for several decades – after breakfasting and a few mugs of the hottest coffee his palette can stand, he shoulders his tool belt and trods his way in knee-high snow to the eastern wall of the Crazy Horse…

    Continue >

  • Introducing the Favorite Toots WordPress Plugin

    One of the primary ways I find new accounts to follow on social media is by eavesdropping on other people’s favorites. Many social networks make each account’s favorites public but Mastodon does not (yet?). So I wanted a way to show my favorites publicly so that others can look through them. And I’m hoping others…

    Continue >

  • My appearance on This Week in WordPress #285

    My thanks to Nathan Wrigley for having me as a guest on This Week in WordPress #285. (YouTube/Apple Podcasts) Show notes There are a few links on the WP Builds website for this episode but I thought I’d share some of the links I mentioned in the episode as well. It was a lot of…

    Continue >

  • If you’re seeing this post that means that my website is once again powered by WordPress. Yay! The site doesn’t look so nice on mobile devices, the feed is broken in a few ways, and I need to get the database load under control… you know, a typical website launch.

    Continue >

  • ActivityPub will cross the chasm in 2024

    In 1991, Geoffrey A. Moore described the challenges of introducing new technology products as Crossing the Chasm. The chasm is this very real gap between the earliest adopters and the early majority adopters of any new technology. By crossing the chasm, the momentum gained usually enables the technology to find market fit. Most protocols, standards,…

    Continue >

  • Hello Hubbub – I’m joining NerdPress

    After a few extremely busy weeks full of rewarding and fast paced work, I’m happy to announce that I’m joining NerdPress as Senior Product Manager. We’ve acquired Grow Social from Mediavine, renamed it Hubbub, and we plan to invest in improving this popular WordPress plugin. Hubbub comes in two flavors; Lite and Pro. Hubbub Lite…

    Continue >

  • Photographers be aware, WordPress may convert your JPEGs to WebP soon

    This isn’t a “the sky is falling” post. However, photographers that use WordPress should be well aware of upcoming changes regarding image file formats. Sarah Gooding, writing for WP Tavern: WebP, an image format developed by Google, which is intended to replace JPEG, PNG, and GIF file formats, will soon be generated by default for…

    Continue >

  • WordPress mobile apps to be simplified

    Paul Von Schrottky on the Make WordPress Mobile blog: Over the years, the WordPress app has evolved to meet a diverse range of site administration needs and use cases. Features like Stats, Reader, and Notifications were introduced with the hope of meeting some of these needs. However, these features require the Jetpack plugin or a…

    Continue >

  • Davis Blocks

    Sarah Gooding, writing for WP Tavern: WordPress theme author Anders Norén has remade his popular Davis theme to support full-site editing. The new theme, Davis Blocks, is sporting the same clean design as its predecessor, and can be used as a starter theme or a lightweight blog theme. I used Davis, Anders original theme for WordPress, for…

    Continue >

  • How I track social media profile clicks

    Would you like to know how many people found your blog from Mastodon? How about how many people find your YouTube channel via TikTok? Back in my day, when someone clicked on a link from one website to another, the destination site could easily tell where the traffic was coming from. It was called the…

    Continue >

  • Nyasha Green on the issues within the WordPress community

    Nyasha Green recently published a post that covers a few issues she’s seeing within the WordPress community and offers solutions on how to fix those issues. One issue she calls out is that the community relies on free labor: Paying people for their labor is simply not what the spirit of the WordPress community stands…

    Continue >

  • My 2020 blogging stats

    Yes, I’m writing this post in July of 2021. I don’t know what to tell you. Number of posts per month: Total number of posts: 353 A rather large portion were titleless status updates. I started off with a bang on January 1 by announcing my full return to the Mac. And here I am,…

    Continue >

  • A few quick notes about building Micro.blog themes

    It took me just a few days to convert the Cypress WordPress theme for use on Micro.blog. Since the layout, design, and styling for most elements was already done – the main work was learning Micro.blog’s theming model and moving the code bits around. I thought it would be a good opportunity to jot down…

    Continue >

  • Using Docker to build a WordPress theme

    If you have no idea what Docker is or how it works, this blog post won’t help you too much. For that, I recommend Julia Evans’ Zine How Containers Work! I recently wanted to build a premium WordPress theme to offer here via my website. I started, finished, and released the theme in record time…

    Continue >

  • Cypress – A premium portfolio theme for WordPress is now available

    Cypress on WordPress Cypress is a simple way to create an online portfolio using the world’s leading website builder WordPress. Artists from all mediums; painters, photographers, designers, sculptures – all need a way to showcase their best work online. Cypress is an affordable way for artists to set up a website to control their brand,…

    Continue >

  • A new theme for my site

    Update December 10, 2020: I tried. And I’ve now reverted. For the last several years I’ve been using a customized version of the Davis theme by Anders Norén. I started using the theme right out of the box and slowly customized it to my needs as I had time to do so. And for that…

    Continue >

  • Marcus Peddle on Flickr

    Marcus Peddle: Creating portfolio pages is a hassle on WordPress even though there are a number of photography templates. Adding photos is time consuming and I am rarely happy with the layout. Making albums and browsing on Flickr, however, is easy. I can make an album in just a couple of minutes and the layout…

    Continue >

  • Audio: My armchair analysis of Automattic acquiring Tumblr

    Date recorded: August 19, 2019 Yesterday while driving (sorry for the audio quality) I recorded a quick audio bit to distill my thoughts on why Automattic acquired Tumblr. Short-version: Automattic sees Tumblr as an entry point for new WordPress.com customers – especially youth. For someone to go from idea to full commerce or publishing success…

    Continue >

  • Automattic acquires Tumblr

    Matt Mullenweg, on this Tumblog: When the possibility to join forces became concrete, it felt like a once-in-a-generation opportunity to have two beloved platforms work alongside each other to build a better, more open, more inclusive – and, frankly, more fun web. I knew we had to do it. Let’s get a few things out…

    Continue >

  • A new interview with Manton Reece of Micro.blog for 2019

    Last year, around this time, I published an interview with Manton Reece – founder of Micro.blog (M.b) – about how the platform was growing and what the goals for 2018 were. It was such a great interview and it helped me to understand the direction that M.b was going that I knew I had to…

    Continue >

  • Signal v Noise exits Medium

    DHH: These days Medium is focused on their membership offering, though. Trying to aggregate writing from many sources and sell a broad subscription on top of that. And it’s a neat model, and it’s wonderful to see Medium try something different. But it’s not for us, and it’s not for Signal v Noise. SvN was…

    Continue >

  • Matt Haughey on the mobile WordPress app

    Matt Haughey vents his frustrations with WordPress: Over the past week I’ve written a bunch of posts while out and about using the iOS WordPress app, often with photos of things I was seeing. But unless I was on WiFi or had 5 bars of LTE connectivity, I would get a Posting Failed, Retry? message.…

    Continue >

  • The Android apps I use every day

    From the time I switched to Android in late-2017 (more here) I’ve been installing and uninstalling apps and services from my phone – trying to find the right mix for me. I expect the apps, preferences, and everything about my mobile experience to continue to change but lately it seems to have settled a little.…

    Continue >

  • An interview with Manton Reece of Micro.blog

    I have fond memories of the very early days of WordPress (when it had just been forked from b2/cafelog), of Twitter, of Brightkite, of App.net, of Mastodon… just to name a few. The early days of any platform or so important to what they will become. They are the most fun to watch. The early…

    Continue >

  • Facebook will drop the patent clause for React license

    Matt Mullenweg: I am surprised and excited to see the news that Facebook is going to drop the patent clause that I wrote about last week. They’ve announced that with React 16 the license will just be regular MIT with no patent addition. I applaud Facebook for making this move, and I hope that patent…

    Continue >

  • Matt Mullenweg on Automattic’s use of React

    Matt Mullenweg: I’m here to say that the Gutenberg team is going to take a step back and rewrite Gutenberg using a different library. It will likely delay Gutenberg at least a few weeks, and may push the release into next year. Automattic will also use whatever we choose for Gutenberg to rewrite Calypso —…

    Continue >

  • Mobile blogging goals (audio)

    Recorded September 10, 2017 Starting with this audio bit I’m making a few changes. I’m ditching the episode numbers. My audio bits are not a podcast, they aren’t really episodes, and keeping track of the numbers is just more work. I will, however, denote in the title that this is an audio post. I’m also…

    Continue >

  • JSON Feed WordPress plugin

    Manton Reece just released the JSON Feed WordPress plugin into the WordPress directory. Making it mad easy to install and support the new spec. WP Admin → Plugins → Add New, then search for “jsonfeed”. I’ve updated to this version in the directory so that all future updates come from there as well.

    Continue >

  • Attending NEPA WordPress Meetup for March 2017

    Last night was the NEPA WordPress Meetup for March 2017. It was a panel discussion regarding how agencies use WordPress with Jack Reager of Black Out Design (our gracious host, thanks Jack and team), Liam Dempsey and Lauren Pittenger of LBDesign in the Philadelphia-area, and your’s truly of Condron Media. As these types of events…

    Continue >

  • Post filtering fixes at Homebrew Website Club

    Last night Tucker Hottes, Den Temple and I held the first Homebrew Website Club at The Keys in Scranton, PA. I really appreciate that HWC will force me to set aside some time to work on my personal site since it is often neglected for more pressing projects. During HWC I began trying to fix…

    Continue >

  • Angelina Simms on the Philly Burbs WordPress group

    Angelina Simms published her experience at WordCamp US this year. Note this bit about the Philly Burbs WordPress group: Too often, we are surrounded by people who act like they are concerned about your well-being out of self-interest and totally disappear if you don’t fit into their grand scheme of things. That is definitely not…

    Continue >

  • Attending the Philly Burbs WordPress meetup

    Do you know the visible signs of a strong community? If you’ve ever attended a Philly Burbs WordPress meetup then you definitely do. Last night my new coworker Tucker Hottes and I drove the 2.5 hours to Pheonixville, PA for this month’s WordPress meetup in the Philly Burbs meetup group. What we saw during the…

    Continue >

  • FADE INTO A WORDPRESS LOGO

    INTERIOR, COFFEE SHOP, HOUSTON, TEXAS Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress, wearing a WordPress tshirt, brainstorms over a latte. MULLENWEG, internal dialogue: "How can I get WordPress in front of the Wix customer base for free?" … MULLENWEG: *opens WordPress on his Mac* …. MULLENWEG: Publishes: "The Wix Mobile App, a WordPress Joint" to his WordPress-powered blog.…

    Continue >

  • Hacking rather than waiting

    Yesterday afternoon Sarah Pressler retweeted Jono Young’s request for a plugin that would add a submenu to the WordPress’ Admin with the current pages for the site under the Pages menu. This would reduce the number of clicks to get to the page editor. I was waiting for an upload to finish and I thought, given the code…

    Continue >

  • A date picker to schedule posts in WordPress

    On Sunday mornings I make some coffee, sit down at my computer, and choose 7 images to publish to my blog throughout the week. After I’ve chosen and edited the images I schedule them in WordPress to be published each morning at around 9:00am. I can then go about my week knowing that each day there…

    Continue >

  • Migrating Subscriptions from one Stripe account to another

    Update June 2021: I’ve had enough interest in this service that I’ve created StripeTransfer.com — Please visit this site to schedule your consultation. Learn More at StripeTransfer.com One of my recent client programming projects (hire me here) was to help a company migrate all customers, cards, plans, and subscriptions from one Stripe account to another…

    Continue >

  • How I converted from Custom Post Types to Post Formats

    It wasn’t too ugly. But it wasn’t exactly a cool swim either. I thought I would jot down why and how I moved from using a Custom Post Type for each type of post that I publish here — status, photo, audio, and normal post — to Post Formats. First, why move to Post Formats from Custom Post…

    Continue >

  • Presenting at the NEPA WordPress Meetup

    Tonight I had the privilege of presenting at our local NEPA WordPress Meetup. We were also privileged to host the event at our space in Carbondale, PA. ![](http://static.public.getbarley.com/colin.getbarley.com/barley-media-uploads/2016/3/2014-01-14 19.37.37-1457702949814.jpg) My presentation was entitled The History & Future of Inline Editing. I’m sure there will be a video posted online as soon as it is ready.

    Continue >

  • Thanks to everyone who helped make Barley for WordPress a reality

    Inspired by Shawn Blanc’s post wherein he thanked the people that helped make The Sweet Setup a reality I thought I’d take a few moments to thank everyone that helped make Barley for WordPress, our team’s inline editing plugin for WordPress, a reality. A plugin of this scope has no one author. It takes an…

    Continue >

  • A case for something, anything more simple than WordPress

    There is a growing sentiment that WordPress – though incredibly well supported and ubiquitous – is simply far too complex for some projects and for some customers. Obviously, I think so too. That’s why my company is building Barley. Here are a few other notable people that seem to believe the same thing, that while WordPress…

    Continue >

  • Meeting up in Philly

    The Philadelphia WordPress and Weblogger meetups are over, for April. Eliza, Chris, and I drove down to Philadelphia (it takes us about two and half hours), and enjoyed the company of many bloggers in the Philly area. First, we met up with Andrea and Tom. This happened to be Tom’s first Meetup also. It would…

    Continue >

  • Philadelphia Meetups

    Also known as: Colin’s first try at this meetup thing. This Saturday, at around 2pm EST, Eliza, Chris and I are heading down to Philadelphia for the April Philadelphia WordPress Meetup, organized by Owen Winkler. Shortly thereafter, since it would appear that the WordPress meetup will only last about an hour, we’ll attend the April…

    Continue >