Leaf peeping by bike
This is a sweet ride around seacoast New Hampshire and southwestern Maine. It combines mountains and coasts with a little urban riding in Dover and Portsmouth. The dirt road up to Mt. Agamenticus is in good shape.
Get started with WordPress Development
Someone asked how to get started developing with WordPress. Here’s my take on it. You gotta learn to use it first. These are steps to getting power-user skills. Hosting Buy an account on a budget hosting service. ~US$10 per month is a reasonable cost. It MUST support multiple WordPress sites. Sometimes these are called “subdomains” … Read more
Meds too expensive? Try this, it’s brilliant!
Every web site needs one post with a silly clickbait title. But this is good stuff. I take a med called a statin. I take the generic version, and I’m lucky that my health insurance plan covers the cost. But once the local CVS refilled it, and when I went to pick it up they … Read more
A birthday song
Here’s a song my brother Barney Jones composed for my recent birthday. I am lucky to have such a talented family. Thanks, Barney! Most of the material on this site is Creative Commons licensed. This isn’t. It is Copyright (c) 2023 Barney Jones. All Rights Reserved.
Names in WordPress settings API
To plugin developers WordPress offers the Settings API. It lets us define settings pages, sections within those pages and fields within the sections. WordPress Settings API We use WordPress options to store configuration variables for our plugins. The settings API lets us create pages in the WordPress back-end dashboard to allow users to enter and … Read more
Jetbrains Gateway is really nice
Jetbrains, the Czech company that makes PhpStorm, WebStorm and Intellij-Idea, has their Gateway product in beta. It works like this: you run the Gateway software on your desktop machine — you know, the one with the nice display — and it connects to some other development machine to run your IDE. I’ve been using it … Read more
Filtering Database Changes During WordPress Updates
During its occasional and automatic core version updates (for example from version 5.9.2 to 5.9.3) WordPress inspects its tables in its database server (MariaDB or MySQL) and tries to restore them to WordPress’s standard schema. Sometimes a site owner or plugin customizes those tables. For example my Index WP MySQL For Speed plugin reorganizes some … Read more
“Fatal Error” Adding Keys
Sometimes the Index WP MySQL For Speed plugin for WordPress generates errors when you use it to add keys. These can look like this or similar: What can you do about this? Don’t panic. This (usually) does not mean your site has been corrupted. It simply means your MariaDB or MySQL server was not able … Read more
Big WordPress Instance for Testing
Here’s a WordPress instance with 100,000 fake users made with the DemoPress plugin. It also contains fake posts, pages, and comments. If you need to test a plugin or theme with a large site, this may help you. The image of the instance was made with the Duplicator plugin. Download the zip file, unzip it, … Read more