Half-Elf on Tech

Thoughts From a Professional Lesbian

Category: How It Is

Making philosophy about the why behind technical things.

  • Defining Yourself

    Defining Yourself

    If you took the 2016 WordPress survey, you were asked to define yourself. Blogger, developer, designer, and so on. It’s a profound question, and not just in the metaphysical way.

    More Than One

    I am many things because I represent many things. When I speak, I speak forever with the weight of who I am. I speak and it reflects on DreamHost, my company. On WordPress, where I volunteer. If I were to say I hated Akismet, for example, it could end up on various sites and Facebook groups that the Plugins Team hates Akismet.

    I’ll get back to that in a minute. Last summer I talked about handling bad reviews at WordCamp Europe. I don’t want to repeat that, you can watch it. People leave angry, mean, and outright bad reviews for a lot of reasons, and you can handle them constructively or not, as you like. Obviously I think constructive is better, because those bad reviews, the way you handle them is what’s going to make your reputations.

    The Forest for the Trees

    The problem is that you, the creator, feels so close to your code and creation, that you have trouble divorcing yourself from the review. I find that the more someone has worked in journalism or writing, the less personally they take the reviews, because they have seen their works ripped apart by a red pen before. Artists have to learn how to handle being edited.

    But the other problem is that you forget you’re NOT an artist. If an actor or a musician blows up at people and rants and raves, it may hurt their career, but… people still hire Mel Gibson after his anti-Semitic rant. And Tiny Fey, love her, has been rather transphobic. No one is perfect, not even our idols, and we accept that.

    The Goose vs the Gander

    People are less accepting of their peers. If you get a bad review and explode on someone, calling them names, you’ve hurt yourself and your brand more than any single one star review ever could. Worse, they may treat you like a celebrity, over analyzing every word you say. That one’s a hoot.

    The truth of all this is depressing. You will be hated, intentionally misunderstood, thrown under a bus, leibeled, and slandered. People will assume the worst of you. And because of this, they will assume to worst of your project, your brand, and your company. Forever.

    And this too is depressing, because you will never be free of it. I posted on my blog, sometime last year, a post called “What they don’t tell you.” It listed the downsides to the community, and how these days happen and they suck. And you can’t stop them. I walked away from things decades ago, and they follow me. They haunt me.

    Is There a Truth?

    The obvious question now, the one I am reluctant to answer is HOW do you cope?

    I don’t know.

    I can tell you how I cope, but I don’t know if my answers will help you. I can tell you that it does all suck sometimes, but not all times, and you should have other outlets. I cannot offer the answer, though, because there isn’t just one.

    The one truth I have is that defining myself as someone I can live with being is my answer. For the truth within myself is that as long as I know I am being good and honest and as fair as I can be, I am a good person. And being a good person is what matters most to me.

  • Why I Write About What I Code

    Why I Write About What I Code

    I was asked this the other day. Obviously sometimes I write about technology in general, or software I find and like, but a great deal of the posts here are about how I figure things out. And the reason I do that is, simply, it makes me a better writer and a better coder.

    Want to write better?

    There’s nothing that will make you a better write than writing. You will learn your voice, your tone, and your flavor of writing only if you write. It doesn’t matter if your writing is bad at first. By writing more and more and more you will only get better and better at the process, and more comfortable doing it.

    Getting into the habit of writing, where it’s an every day occurrence in your life, is imperative if you want to write better. It’s a talent, yes, but it’s also a skill. And if you don’t practice skills they get rusty. If they get too rusty, they break and you give up.

    Want to code better?

    The fastest way to get better at code is to read and review other people’s code and try to figure out how they did what they did. The reason I can continue to think as sharply as I do about plugin reviews is that I do it every day. Every. Single. Day. I look at 30 to 100 plugins, review the code as written by just as many developers, reverse engineer what they’ve done, and I start to understand better. I peer review people’s code, day in and day out.

    But nothing makes you a better code than coding. Obviously. And yet there’s one thing most people miss. You see, the critical review of your own code is absolutely necessary if you want to become a better coder. And in the absence of peer reviewed code, the best thing to do is rip it apart yourself.

    Can you explain your code?

    That’s it. That’s the magic. If you can explain your code, why you did what you did, why it does what it does, then you are at the step of critically reviewing your code. The number of times my code has improved because I’ve blogged about it is uncountable. As I write my post, I find myself typing “I used the function X because…” and I stop. Why did I use that function?

    It’s in the questioning of my own actions that I begin to understand my own internal logic. You know, the part of your brain your parents and teachers helped you form. Those early days of logic where you learned fire was hot and one plus one was two, you also developed your own style of thinking.

    Can you explain why?

    My father likes to tell me I used to do my math backwards, from left to right, before my school taught me otherwise. On occasion, I still do it that way because I want to look at my math from a different perspective. Talking about why I do that changes my understanding of the process. The solution was always the same, but the process of getting there is vastly different.

    When I talk about why I chose the path I did, I do more than just verbalize to myself what I’ve done, I teach someone else that there’s an answer and there’s a way to their answers as well. I’ve shown a path.

    I write to understand myself

    Above all else, I write to understand myself. Only by doing that can I improve at anything.

  • CMB2: Size Matters

    CMB2: Size Matters

    One of the problems with adding a million custom meta boxes is that you have to arrange them in a way that doesn’t make the post editor suck.

    In today’s example I have the following custom meta ‘items’:

    • Featured Image: 1
    • Taxonomies: 3
    • Dropdown selections: 3
    • “Rating” scores: 4
    • Text Boxes: 6 (1 plain text, 5 TinyMCE)

    That’s a lot of data. And it takes up a lot of space. Here’s how I made it less insane.

    Group your data

    While it’s tempting to show all your post meta in one giant block, don’t. This can sound counterintuitive because the goal here is to save space, but the problem is that not everyone who edits a post needs all the information. Let’s pretend you’ve tasked your intern (or yourself) with going through 560 posts and editing one field. You can minimize everything else to make less scrolling, so group your items wisely.

    Make a section for ‘These are totally required’ and put it on top. Put the ‘We’d like this data…’ in another section. And then the checkboxes and yes/no dropdown can go into a sidebar. Less space, more filling.

    Use a grid

    The first way to not go insane is to use CMB2 grid. This allows me to combine related boxes into a simple grid pattern (hence the name) so they took up less space. The four ratings have commiserate text boxes, so with the grid I displayed the rating on the left and the text box on the right.

    Similarly, all of my dropdown selections are small so I made a grid of two of them. They show up side by side in a sidebar.

    Only use TinyMCE when you have to

    TinyMCE takes up a lot of room. But sometimes you really do need it and not just plain text. When you do, consider TeenyMCE instead of TinyMCE. TeenyMCE is a smaller version of TinyMCE, hence the name, and it only shows a small subset of the normal TinyMCE options. The advanced bar is gone completely. To use it with CMB2, you want to make the teeny option true:

    $cmb_showdetails->add_field( array(
	'name'       => 'WYSIWYG Area',
	'id'         => $prefix . 'myarea',
	'type'       => 'wysiwyg',
	'options'    => array(
		'textarea_rows' => 10,
		'teeny'         => true,
		'media_buttons' => false,
	),
) );

    And don’t worry, markdown works fine in the teeny window.

    Make TeenyMCE even smaller

    Even with TeenyMCE, there were some values I knew we didn’t need. So I removed them:

    add_filter( 'teeny_mce_buttons', 'myplugin_teeny_mce_buttons' );
teeny_mce_buttons( $buttons ) {
	$remove = array( 'alignleft', 'aligncenter', 'alignright', 'undo', 'redo', 'fullscreen' );
	return array_diff( $buttons, $remove );
}

    You may not want to remove them all, but certainly you don’t need fullscreen.

    What are your tricks?

    What do you do to keep your meta boxes from getting the best of you?

  • Will You Help Me Sell My Plugin?

    Will You Help Me Sell My Plugin?

    I get asked this a lot. It comes with the territory, but people ask me to help them monetize their plugins all the time. And my answer is always the same.

    No

    As much as I am a strong advocate of people making money off of WordPress, and as much as I support plugin and theme devs in their work, I’m not out here to help you run your business. While I do spend time thinking of ways to get people to pay for services and software, I don’t prioritize it, and most of my ideas are just that. Ideas.

    Really what people are asking for is my ideas and my free work. And to that, I say no.

    Business Help Isn’t Free

    If you wanted to hire me to help, to look at your code and to assist you in coming up with business strategies, based on my experience in the WordPress world, that’s a different matter. That gets a ‘no’ because I don’t have the time to dedicate to that work. I have a full time job that I do like, and I have some volunteer work I enjoy, and I have a very addictive side project. Since I enjoy being married, I don’t take on extra work right now. I don’t need the money.

    But the point here, if you can’t tell, is that yes, I would expect you to pay me for my work.

    I’m No Good At Sales

    Of course, keep in mind the fact that I’m a terrible salesman. I don’t like exaggerating what a product can do, I don’t like even suggesting a lie. I downplay. And that’s because I don’t like it when people promise the moon and only deliver low Earth orbit. I want realistic goals and possibilities. Can you do anything with this plugin? Sure. But it comes at a cost and I feel people should know that cost.

    I’m Hard to be Bought

    Everyone may have a price, but my price is rarely money. I know this sounds weird, since I said I expect people to pay me for my work. You see, asking me to do you a favor for free doesn’t really happen. But also, asking me to do you a favor for pay won’t happen.

    And by this I mean reviews.

    I’ve been asked, many times, to review people’s themes and plugins and post about it here. And in general, I say no. I review the things I use and like because I use and like them. I’m driven by usability. If I like your ‘thing’ and I think people should hear about it, I’ll talk it up. If your thing is free or for sale, I don’t care. What I care is if your thing was what I needed and wanted, and I liked it.

    I Won’t Help You Sell

    That’s not my deal. It’s not my deal on this blog. I’ve never been bought off for a review, I’ve never been asked “Would you review this product of mine?” unless I’ve already been known to use it. And even then, I’ve told people “You don’t want me to review it. I like it, but you have some bad bugs.”

    I’m honest. I’m direct. I’m incurably truthful.

    You probably don’t want me to help you sell your stuff, but if I really like it, I may anyway.

  • I’ll Know A Duck When I See It

    I’ll Know A Duck When I See It

    After I complained about the new SEO scam, someone pointedly argued it wasn’t spam. And it wasn’t a scam.

    It is and it’s both.

    What Is Spam?

    By it’s most basic definition, spam is an irrelevant or otherwise inappropriate message, sent on the internet, to a large group of people.

    With that definition in hand, someone who interrupts a Slack or IRC meeting to tell a joke is spamming. At the same time, Tweeting inanities is not unless you cut into a conversation thread. And the different being that Twitter is always irrelevant so any comment there is expected to be appropriately inappropriate.

    Spam is More Than Spam

    The issue is that spam has expanded to be more than just that simple blast of junk you didn’t care about. Spam now includes things like being added to an email list you didn’t want to join. And it includes people trying to rip you off.

    A scam is an attempt to get something from you. The end goal of a lot of spam is to scam you out of money, so the intersection there is pretty high. It always has been. The result of a spambot is to convince you to do something you didn’t want, in order to get something you have. But the target of scams is to out and out separate you from your money.

    If It Looks Like a Duck …

    You’ve probably heard of the duck test.

    If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.

    When people read an email from some Nigerian prince, they know it’s spam because they’ve seen things like it before. But they also know it’s a scam because they’ve been taught that no one offers something for nothing.

    Unsolicited Emails Are Ducks

    If you get an email you didn’t ask for, from someone you’ve never heard of, offering something that’s too good to be true (like ‘free backlinks’), it’s a duck.

    If you look at the emails from these people who offer to help you fix your site and improve your links to broken locations, it’s a duck. It’s a scam, it’s spam, and you should delete it. Don’t even ask.

  • FacetWP: Making Sorting Suck Less

    FacetWP: Making Sorting Suck Less

    Sorting data in WordPress is generally done in the most basic of ways. You want to see all posts that are in a specific category, you go to example.com/category/drinks/ and there you are. But if you want to see everything in the category ‘drinks’ with the tag ‘bourbon’ and the custom taxonomy of ‘ingredients’ and a value of ‘mint’ AND ‘simple syrup’ to get the recipe for a mint julep, then you have a pretty crazy complex query.

    Enter FacetWP

    FacetWP is a premium plugin that, for $79 a year, handles all that crazy sorting for you. And yes, it’s worth it.

    FacetWP introduces advanced filtering to WordPress, which lets you do things like get that list of all drinks made with bourbon that include a simple syrup, in a dynamic way! It’s incredibly fast, since it’s using ajax and javascript, and as long as you have enough server memory to index all the data in the first place, it’s faster than reloading a new category page.

    Downsides

    In order to be that fast, you do not get pretty URLs. Let’s say you have your drinks category at `example.com/category/drinks’ and you want to list all those things. Your URL will look like this:

    example.com/category/drinks/?fwp_alcohol=bourbun&fwp_ingredients=simple+syrup%2Cmint

    The realistic reason they don’t try to make it ‘pretty’ is that it would create a lot more rewrite rules than would be sustainable, if you have a lot of facets. The number of checks would slow your site down, and that would kind of suck.

    Compatibility Notes

    If you use CMB2 you’ll need FacetWP + CMB2.

    If you use Genesis themes, there are two tricks. First, you’ll want to use the following function to add FacetWP’s CSS to your theme:

    function YOURTHEMENAME_facetwp_class( $atts ) {
    $atts['class'] .= ' facetwp-template';
    return $atts;
}
add_filter( 'genesis_attr_content', 'YOURTHEMENAME_facetwp_class' );

    Second, if you’re like me and you use a lot of custom loops, they may not behave as expected. If you call the loop multiple times on a page (which is bad behavior in the first place and I know it), FacetWP has a bit of trouble knowing what javascript to apply to what section. That should be expected, and once I cleaned it up, it worked great.

    Should you use it?

    If you have a lot of complex intersectional queries to sort through, yes.

    If you need dynamic result updates, yes.

    It works.