Faster site with cache
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 …
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 …
WordPress Plugin Framework Creation
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 …
Everything we know about WordPress we learned from the documentation
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 …
State of the site: Features and Progress [May 2017]
Every so often I publish a post like this going over our plans and how far along they are. These posts give an overview of all the features that are active, how well we are progressing, and which features we have planned but not yet gotten out of the door. …
WordPress Child Themes: It’s a bit like that.
Creating a child theme has nothing whatsoever to do with actual children. It is a WordPress term that basically means the same as extends does in PHP. For those of you reading this that are not PHP geeks, a child theme is like creating modifications without modifying the theme itself. You …
Now with books
Author Buzz now has the books feature sort of working. We have now added the ability to create a database of your published books. The limits are the currently you need to access the admin area and your books do not show up on your feed or profile. Obviously, this is …