Tag Archives: Thoughts

Good morning, 2012!

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As I type this, it’s 6:16am on January 1st, 2012. For the last 30 minutes, I’ve been up with a cup of coffee and bowl of cereal, welcoming in the new year (this after having gone to sleep at around 12:30am as well). Despite the early hour, I’m ready to get 2012 started and get moving!

2011 was a year of much excitement and many developments for me. Travels, WordPress plugin releases and exciting developments at WooThemes, coupled with the inclusion of our new family member, Maddie (now almost 5 months old), made for a truly amazing year.

With 2011 now firmly in the past, I’d imagine the usual chain of thought is happening with you all as well… “what new years resolutions should I make?”, “should I make any new years resolutions at all?”, “can I actually keep any of them?”. These are three questions that have been on my mind on and off for the last day or so (clearly, new years resolutions don’t weigh down on me :P ). I figured, lets cement a few down in a blog post as a starting point, and see if it’s possible to get them done sooner rather than later in the new year.

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What a blog redesign means to me

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Today’s question, folks, is; “What does a blog redesign mean to you?”. Lets dive right in, shall we?

For me, a blog redesign means quite a lot. It means the opportunity to hone my skills, experiment with new ideas and techniques and put a fresh coat of paint and a new engine behind my blog. Let me elaborate on the paint and engine for a moment.

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A quick word on Freedom Day

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Wow, good morning everyone. Yes, I’m up, sleepy-eyed and fighting back yawns, to blog. It feels great!

Today is Freedom Day in South Africa… yes, yet another public holiday in April. This day is, however, more than just another of the many April-based public holidays. Freedom Day remembers the first post-apartheid political election, held on this day in 1994. For South Africans, this day was truly one of a unique nature, as for the first time in a South African election, the entire nation was truly free to cast their vote as they wished… or to even cast their vote in the first place.

If you were in the country at the time in 1994, try to think back on how things were at the time, and before. However you choose to spend today, please set aside a moment to think about the concept of freedom and what it truly means.

A quick word on inspiration and driving output

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What is inspiration? Where does it come from? How can it drive productive output? These are all valid questions.

At this moment, it’s a little misty outside my window. It’s early and I’m almost on my way to a nice hot cup of tea. This doesn’t seem related to the post at all, does it? It is. All of these factors are instrumental in driving productive output from within me. A relaxed environment with average, slightly overcast, weather conditions and the want for a soothing cup of tea. Continue reading →

Are WordPress.org users missing out?

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For whatever reason you began blogging, be it personal or otherwise, one aspect of blogging transcends blog type: comments and commenting. Whether you’re blogging about your most recent holiday or about the latest piece of technology, it’s always a nice feeling to receive a comment on your post. A large part of receiving comments on blog posts is, I believe, community related. If there is a community around your blog of regular like-minded visitors who share an interest in your writing, there will surely be more frequent commenting on your blog’s posts.

This brings me to the main topic of this post: do self-hosted WordPress users miss out on natural community interaction? Continue reading →

A change of scenery and why I try not to write draft posts

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Okay, lately I’ve been blogging a lot about WordPress, Magento and coding in general. Time for a breather, folks. No techie stuff in this blog post, just a fun, relaxing read about a change of scenery, stream-of-conscious writing and why I prefer it to writing draft blog posts.

Okay, just a little bit of techie stuff (let’s get it over with, shall we?). Over the weekend past, I released the WP Section Index WordPress plugin. Check it out and let me know what you think and how it works for you.

I find that, throughout the day, I get ideas for blog posts I’d like to write. Posts about music, WordPress or random thoughts that enter my head. Gradually, I start forming the skeleton of the post in my mind and, at times, the post gets entered as a draft in the administration console, eagerly waiting to be finished, polished and published. This approach, more often than not, doesn’t seem to work. Continue reading →

Child plugins in WordPress. An idea?

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I’ve been reading a lot over the past few months about child themes in WordPress and how users have found them to be an invaluable resource when creating WordPress themes.

What’s this “child theme” thing?

For those unfamiliar with the concept, the way I’d explain it is as follows:

A user chooses a WordPress theme (or theme framework) which they would like to customise. They then create a new theme with only the files required for the customisation. The main change comes in the style.css file where the theme details are specified. The line “Template” is added to the theme details, which then specifies the folder name of the main theme (chosen above). An example block would like like this:
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A theory on approaching difficult tasks

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Whichever industry you work in, whether you work for yourself or a company and whatever your job description, there are days where things just aren’t going your way. No matter how long you sit at your desk, tapping your pencil, the solution to the problem at hand just isn’t apparent.

As a developer, the problem and solution are usually quite clean-cut (such is the nature of code, prodominantly). The solution, however clean-cut it may be, isn’t always visible when approaching a coding task. At times like those, I employ a theory:
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