Everything should be working again but I managed to break everything quite badly today. First I installed a new plugin which ended up causes a network-wide server error. I then disabled all plugins which was a bit of a sledgehammer approach. After I removed the broken plugin, I had to …

In case you thought we had all upped sticks and vanished without a trace. Here is a general update on Author Buzz. The focus of the team has of late been divided into two broadly equal categories. Participating and establishing the community Coping with the heat Content Updates Now that …

We can finally announce some forward progress in the area of modifying member profiles to do what we need them to do. This is almost entirely down to one man who I have never met.

With a little luck, the site(s) should now be a little bit faster. For those of you who are interested let’s look at how we made Author Buzz a bit faster. Pretty much most of the speed improvements have come from installing W3 Total Cache. Despite my reservations, it seems …

It seems to me that everything about WordPress, BuddyPress and the like are written in such a way as to be so mind numbingly hard it might honestly be easier to get a vogon to write good poetry. Last time, in “The World’s Grumpiest Dev” I talked about how much …

Grumpy Dev Syndrome is the term I came up with a while back to describe that funk that devs (developers) can get into when everything just seems to suck and the only answer is to unload your irritation on someone else. The dark side of Grumpy Dev Syndrome is when users …

As both a dev and a storyteller, I know that games can make an excellent platform for telling stories and it is something I dream about quite frequently. This dreaming leads to an unhealthy dose of Grumpy Dev Syndrome because, well, I can’t use games to tell stories and I …

There are days when despite my best efforts I sort of just feel all Marvin the android with a side order of Eeyore. Today is one of those days. I am a grumpy dev and you should probably just stop reading. Today I feel like the best and worst dev in …

One of the challenges for Author Buzz was that we need a lot of different functions and features without polluting the plugin list with a large collection of things that blog users cannot directly access. Our ideal solution would be to wrap all the features into one plugin. However, we also …

I cannot say this loudly or often enough: If you did not document it, it does not exist. For two straight days, I have been trying to get to the bottom of the WTF of a few basic elements of WrdPress Themes and BuddyPress. When I say basic I really …