Tag: wordpress

The highs and lows of my first ‘proper’ hire

I made my first “proper” hire at Ultimately Better last month. Well, proper in the sense that I wasn’t just offering a salaried position to a long-standing freelancer; proper in the sense that I had to write a job spec, advertise, interview and make Big Important Decisions. I find the whole process of hiring someone […]

Dogfooding

I’ve been talking to a lot of clients lately about migrating their websites to Gutenberg. If you saw my last post on Gutenberg development, you’ll know I’ve been building more and more sites with it recently. Still sticking, stubbornly, to classic editor for my own site(s) though. Eating your own dog food – or dogfooding […]

10 Micro Optimisations for a Faster WordPress Website

(Update 2019-08-07: this article is now available in Brazilian Portuguese: 10 dicas para um site WordPress mais rápido) — Website speed is a huge factor in your search engine (specifically Google) ranking: As part of that effort, today we’re including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly […]

pipdig: Your Questions Answered

This blog post is a follow-up to yesterday’s post: Security alert: pipdig insecure, DDoSing competitors. Firstly, to re-iterate, my accusations are as follows… pipdig did knowingly and with malicious intent: used other blogger’s servers to perform a DDoS on a competitor manipulated blogger’s content to change links to competitor WordPress migration services to point to […]

Genesis column shortcodes with custom classes

(tl;dr download .zip here) I, more often than not, roll out WordPress sites these days using Genesis as my framework of choice for theme development. It’s mostly because I’m lazy, and it does a bunch of stuff for me that I can’t be bothered to do myself (which gives me more time to focus on […]

How to: make the whole WordPress excerpt clickable

A client recently asked me to make the post excerpts in their blog page clickable. This seems like a reasonable request and the logical answer (if you know your WordPress basics) is to open the relevant template file (probably index.php or home.php in this case) and wrap the_excerpt(); in <a href=”<?php the_permalink(); ?>”.. (and so […]

HostPapa? More like HostCrapper*

* sorry, I couldn’t help myself. Yesterday I opened my work inbox first thing to a panicked email from a client (Sutton Community Farm) labelled “URGENT” – their website had gone down (again) with a Resource Limit Reached error. I quickly shot off a reply to let them know that this was usually caused by […]

My Internet History

I’ve been trawling the Way Back Machine lately for links & images for my recently re-added geek t-shirts collection page (work in progress), and happened upon a link to a page I used to have: “My Internet History”. I don’t have this page any more, it was one of the things I dropped when I […]