Category: Tips & Tutorials

Keeping up a blog is hard work. It’s almost never in anyone’s job description at a small business, so it falls through the cracks. You’re saying we need to blog regularly if we want to rank well in search engines? Hm, I think Jane at the front desk likes to write. She’ll do it! Literally…

By default, Laravel Homestead generates a security certificate for all sites you register, allowing you to quickly develop via HTTPS on your local machine. To get your browser to trust Homestead’s self-signed certificates, you have some options: Click through the privacy warning every time you visit a local site Add each generated certificate one by…

Ever found yourself working on a site where someone has made modifications directly to a third-party theme that now has updates? It doesn’t take long in the WordPress business to start running into these. It makes updating really time-consuming. A lot of people will just punt on the updates and manage with their forked theme.…

Bedrock from Roots is a modern take on structuring a WordPress website. It leans on Composer to manage all third-party dependencies (WordPress core, plugins, and themes where possible), flexes PHP environment variables for configuring your site, and so ultimately results in a more robust setup that I’m more comfortable managing. Almost all WordPress projects at…

Laravel Spark is a pretty nifty framework that allows you to get up and running quickly with your next software-as-a-service (SaaS) idea. I’ve used it in a couple places, including my leads group management platform called Pond. One of the many features it includes is a notifications system. The system supports two kinds of notifications:…

Christmas is nothing without trees, stockings, and Santa. While most of us can handle trimming the tree and hanging our stockings, Santa has a few expectations before he comes bounding down the chimney. Mainly: You have to be nice all year! You have to leave cookies If you don’t feel confident that you’ve been nice,…

WordPress’s Gutenberg editor is here. It’s big, shiny, and a little scary. But it’s the future of WordPress! Features are going to be built around it, and while using the Classic Editor plugin means you don’t have to adopt the new editor right away, you’re only punting the football down the field. In my world,…

InfiniteWP (IWP) is a centralized management solution for WordPress sites. For someone who manages a large number of WordPress sites, it’s a great way to manage backups, roll out emergency updates, and more, all from one place. All my ongoing clients are hosted on their own VPS at Digital Ocean. This allows me to scale…

Are you at your desk? If not, imagine it. Look left. Look right. If you’re anything like me, there’s probably a very specific kind of mess staring back at you. Piles. Big stuff on the bottom, little stuff on top, stacked “neatly” for you to go through at some unspecified later time, which you recurringly…