So it turns out I was wrong
I have discovered that my ire at a certain plugin author was not wholly justified. It turns out that the three plugins I have began removing were retired because the “pro” all in one plugin is now free. That said, having removed those and other plugins that we were not …
Slowly removing the Inbound Now plugins
When we started Author Buzz the hope was to create a set of tools for authors to engage in quality marketing. As part of that, we carefully curated a set of plugins and themes that we would be happy to recommend. One such set of plugins offered a complete lead …
Working around Tumblr’s broken RSS feed.
I don’t know if anyone has noticed but Tumblr’s RSS feeds rarely work anywhere else. It turns out that all EU based requests to RSS feeds redirect to a EU policy acceptance page. This includes machine consumed data like RSS feed. I have recently made a pull request to the …
Importing content from other platforms
Today I set myself the task of finalising the import process for a number of large blogs waiting to move into the Author Buzz family. If only life was so simple. It turns out that the last time anyone tried to import from the platforms in question was several major …
5 things WordPress.org really needs to start doing
Today was nothing if not frustrating. I spent hours looking for ways to set up a simple user-badges system and got nowhere fast. Given the huge number of pre-existing plugins that cover this task, I thought (wrongly as it turns out) that I could simply install one of them and …
Story Tracker Software for Writers
This post, unlike most of our dev posts, is not about Author Buzz but about some software that I hope will be hosted on Author Buzz one day. About three years ago I realised that if I was going to make it as a professional writer, I would need to be …
Grumpy Dev on WordPress
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 …
What is Grumpy Dev Syndrome?
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 …
Games as platforms for storytelling
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 …
The world’s grumpiest dev
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 …