Ross's Micro Blog

Last week I used the word “pragmatic” and some weren’t sure what it meant. As an example, here’s a post about what I would call “pragmatic” programming:

https://programmingisterrible.com/post/176657481103/repeat-yourself-do-more-than-one-thing-and

Also… #thankyoutoday for helpful, supportive people who take an interest, are positive, help you grow and gently nudge you to new ideas (rather than forcefully dragging you into them)

This week in projects, posts and pins. My weekly “what I’m up to”. Still not sure if this is useful. Let me know!

https://rosswintle.uk/2018/09/the-week-10th-september-2018/

Oh, gosh. Been forgetting to #thankYouToday. I already did it, really, but let’s have one for yesterday for the organisers, staff, volunteers and runners of the Swindon Half Marathon – such a great event! 👏

Wow. Really hadn’t realised there were so many strong opinions about CSS-in-JS or not. Is there some kind of basic, impartial primer on the pros and cons of each? I mean, I could guess/work it out. But…

This week in projects, posts and pins. My weekly “what I’m up to”. Still not sure if this is useful. Let me know!

https://rosswintle.uk/2018/09/the-week-10th-september-2018/

This is years old. But reminded of it today. It’s still all I got.

Parenthood: The sum of my knowledge

https://rosswintle.uk/2012/05/parenthood-the-sum-of-my-knowledge/

With example questions now alongside the custom messages, you can build a FAQ, and the WordPress plugin then has a shortcode that displays all the “custom knowledge” on a website.

Sweet!

Also added training days to the app, bot, API and plugin!

Yes, I know the interface needs a lot to be desired at this point – will work on that some time!

Gently nudging SchoolBot along while kids watch CBeebies. It has standard “knowledge” like term dates and school meals. But you can also add “Custom messages”. These have keywords to match in questions, responses, expiry dates(!) and now example questions to use in a FAQ list.

 

The flip side of this is: why does WordPress, out of the box, have so many basic security and performance problems? Surely simple brute force protection/rate limiting, two-factor auth, and page caching (or password-less login) are solved problems now?

Thinking I should do a “WordPress Website Drivers License” course.

So many people come to me with “Can you tweak this?” and when I get a login I end up fixing basic security and performance and privacy things.

Not their fault. They don’t know. Which is why a course may work. 🤔

I’m reminded of my daughter, whose utter delight when riding her balance bike is expressed out loud, repeatedly: “I’M DOING IT!”

Sometimes I think that *I* should celebrate what I’m doing this way.

Not out loud, of course! But we should delight in what we CAN do & ARE doing!

These little prompts in my planner/journal are sometimes cheesy and not relevant. But I think the drip, drip, drip of daily positivity does have an effect over time.

Man, I seem to be learning a load of stuff that I should have known for years today.

TIL: You can validate in email address (and domains and URLs) in PHP with filter_var:

http://php.net/manual/en/function.filter-var.php

Just discovered that Lush (cosmetics) have a super-geeky “Digital” section of their website:

https://uk.lush.com/tag/lush-digital

And that the marvellous Sarah Corbett has a new “Activist Whisperer” column!

https://uk.lush.com/tag/activist-whisperer

Amazing.

Huh. My brain has pretty much all the words to REM’s “Ignoreland” in it…

…still.

“Brooding duplicitous wicked and able media-ready heartless and labelled super-US citizen super achiever mega ultra power dosing relax defence defence defence defence. Yeah, yeah yeah.”

Huh.

TIL: Safari is SUPER fussy about parsing dates:

September 4 2018 10:40:00 ✅
2018/09/04 10:40:00 ✅
2018-09-04T10:40:00 ✅
2018-09-04 10:40:00 ❌

😬

(Note: IE is the same, but Edge gets it right – come on Safari!!)

Sodding dates. Programmers, if anything involves dates, be sure to add about 50% to your initial estimate/quote. 🙄

I don’t even know if I’m allowed to do this…?

I mean, it’s just a circle with a drop shadows and an inner shadow, right? It doesn’t represent anything, really. Totally abstract.