This year i’ve worked diligently to get my personal finances in order. From February 2018 to November 2018, i increased my (TransUnion) FICO score by 73 points! To help get a (daily) handle on things, these are the apps i use/check regularly — sometimes several times a day. They are in no particular order. A few of the app links are my personal referral links, by the way. Some offer cool perks for both me […]
Continue Reading …Like many, if not most, web developers, my IDE of choice for the last half decade has been Sublime Text. Prior to ST, i was using TextWrangler and Notepad++; before that, it was NoteTab Light and code-only mode of Dreamweaver (shudders). Still odd that i switched to a quasi open source code editor created by Microsoft, of all companies. They’ve made great strides in the last half decade — an almost about face — figuring […]
Continue Reading …I’m using MAMP Pro and have a separate Host setup for each of my website projects. This let’s me navigate to https://local.mydomain.com instead of https://localhost:8888/mywebsitedirectory. You can easily set up local.mydomain.com to be a.b.c if you wanted; this is my convention for projects. I like to separate local dev with production and sandbox/staging sites. Since i decided to serve fonts locally as web fonts instead of grabbing them from Google or TypeKit or wherever, i noticed this […]
Continue Reading …Looking for an easy WordPress backup solution, i decided to give several plugins a try. One of them was BackWPup. While testing it out, i ran into an issue trying to send backups via email. It was due to the DMARC policy on my domain. Below is an email i received (in Spam) when attempting to do the email backup option. Quick trick to circumvent this issue is to set the “From” address in the […]
Continue Reading …Bitwarden provided instructions to import from LastPass. I suggest you read through the full guide and follow the screenshots before starting the import. It took about three minutes to get my 3,700 passwords imported into Bitwarden.
Continue Reading …For the longest time these “Icon?” (or Icon\r) files kept popping up on my Mac without any rhyme or reason. I would manually delete them. Eventually i got fed up again when several popped up in my main Music folder and all its sub-directories. I googled a Terminal (bash) command to find and delete files based on name. So, here is the command i settled on for my needs. Be sure to change the directory […]
Continue Reading …So, i decided to give Machform a spin on a project i was working on. Figured it would be quick and easy to get up and running. It was — locally — but when deploying to my sandbox/staging server, i ran into issues with sending notification emails. It was maddening. Spent a couple of days getting everything working as needed and on the same page for all three differing environments. The first problem occurred when […]
Continue Reading …You may have heard the term “VPN” (Virtual Private Network) thrown around and how you should use it if you’re connecting to a strange WiFi network or you’re conducting sensitive work at the job. The simple answer for what it is and why you should use a VPN is its a private, encrypted, dedicated connection for your internet activity. Read my article on how end-to-end encryption works so you understand why that’s important. VPNs have other […]
Continue Reading …So, i’m working locally on this site, tweaking my Wikipedia User Contributions Display plugin, and i noticed that some tweaks i pushed live are actually working fine, but locally they’re not (kinda backwards, i know). Heck, anything after the plugin shortcode doesn’t display–it actually breaks the site (footer scripts and other code fails to run). I google for some fix but nothing concrete. I spot something about PHP may be the culprit, but no one […]
Continue Reading …Update: On November 2, 2018, using the DIY method, i successfully repaired the broken hardware of my MacBook Pro for $23.98 + tax. A drastic difference from the $400-500 estimate from the Mac Store. At the end of this post i have appended what i did to fix the keyboard after i had exhausted the steps originally outlined in this post. Cheers. After returning from this past weekend’s WordCamp ATL 2018 — #WCATL — i opened up […]
Continue Reading …So, you’re implementing structured data on your site, particularly using JSON-LD (the latest Google recommendation regarding structured data), but when testing the file or the code used via the Structured Data Testing Tool, you receive an error–particularly this: JSON-LD Missing ‘}’ or object member name. Fortunately, it has a pesky but quick fix. All you have to do is look for the superfluous trailing comma(s) throughout your code. For instance, in the image below, you’ll […]
Continue Reading …Scroll down for the code since i’m a little long-winded on this post. Ye’ve been warned. Yoast’s WordPress SEO plugin is awesome at getting you quickly setup with adding Twitter Cards and Facebook OpenGraph data to your website. But over the latest iterations it’s either added superfluous meta data or removed the options to toggle what is or isn’t shown (version 7.1 is a big culprit of it, which is currently running on this site, […]
Continue Reading …Some backstory: i’ve been developing several WordPress projects back-to-back or in parallel in the last few months, and once they’re ready to transfer from local dev environment to staging server, the content provided to me from clients or coworkers usually becomes stale, needing to be updated with increased frequency or in sporadic bulk edits, which would keep my local database annoyingly out of sync with the staging database. It was a clusterfuck — for lack […]
Continue Reading …Out of the blue, i received a message that i still needed to verify my domain ownership — odd, because two weeks prior i thought i had covered my Firebase custom domain verification. I double-checked i followed the Google instructions verbatim, going so far as deleting and re-entering the records, yet after a few hours, still no luck. Enter doing the tried-and-true thing of Googling, but really hitting up good ol’ StackOverflow. It was suggested […]
Continue Reading …You go to update a plugin or the latest security patch for WordPress, but when you click update you’re prompted for FTP credentials. It can be frustrating and annoying, but it has (typically) a simple fix. This WordPress FTP error is frustration at its peak. You’ll need access to your wp-config.php file and ssh access to your server. Two steps: Apache server — via terminal/command line run sudo chown -Rf www-data:www-data /var/www/html (or could just be /var/www; […]
Continue Reading …All things are moving faster towards a Star Trek and The Jetsons-esque reality: Google’s new Pixel Buds (wireless!) allow real-time language translation in your EAR; Amazon’s Echo and Google’s newly announced Home (and Home Mini) are full-house voice listening/activation devices to do ish throughout your abode. What’s awesome, amazing — and frickin’ freaky! — about these devices are their multiple device packages, which allow messages to be passed room-to-room between devices. Always listening, always aware. […]
Continue Reading …[UPDATE – View updated solution at the bottom of the post.] So, you wanted to update homebrew with the command brew update but received a similar error below: Error: /usr/local must be writable! Simple fix is to run sudo chown -R $(whoami) /usr/local Your problem should now be fixed. If not, you might have ran into this issue that i’ve come across, too: Error: update-report should not be called directly! I fixed this by running […]
Continue Reading …So you installed WordPress in a sub-directory because you want your URL to still be simple, such as installed here www.mydomain.com/wordpress-installed-here/ yet visitors will see www.mydomain.com when navigating your site, but after doing so your blog posts and pages show up as a white blank page. Not good. Luckily, there’s a simple fix! Just update your .htaccess file in the main directory of where your site is located. I’ve put example code for the .htaccess […]
Continue Reading …I was in desperate need for a functioning yet robust, and most importantly, quick-to-install-and-deploy carousel/slider for a large project i was working on for my job. Perusing my job’s rival-of-sorts website, i dove into their code and learned they used Flickity, which i instantly fell in love with after reading its documentation and API. Several ways to install and to call the carousel. With its built-in options and reliance on CSS, it was easy peasy to […]
Continue Reading …Are you interested in governance in general as well as specifically to the Open Source world/community? Check out this read, How Do Open Source Communities Govern Themselves, the second part in a series about governance. It’s written by Randy Fay. This is the start of my Someone Else’s Good Read series of posts. I would like to share interesting ish around the world, but with a quick tidbit or opinion of my own, or really just an […]
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