• Day 1: #WP20 From Blogs to Blocks

    Day 1: #WP20 From Blogs to Blocks

    Prompt 1/20 Blog: What is your WordPress origin story? Share what you’ve already got on your WordPress.org profile, go into more detail, or share a new story. And if you’ve never fully filled out your profile or setup your dot-org account, now’s the time! Post your response on a WordPress website and link to it…

  • david v34.0

    david v34.0

    Time for another annual product review! The thing that I do so infrequently that my last one was at v31.0 in January 2019. This time I’m not writing it as a series of release notes. Gotta shake it up! And my thoughts just aren’t flowing like that right now. Obviously a lot has happened in…

  • Do what you can for your community, your friends, and yourself

    Do what you can for your community, your friends, and yourself

    Covid-19 has clearly become the most important event of the year, and will have long-term effects that we can’t even see yet. One thing that I have noticed positively is the number of people who are stepping up to help their communities. I’ve been thinking a lot about what I could do to help, and…

  • Flashback Conference Recap

    Flashback Conference Recap

    I was thankful to spend the start of this week at the Flashback Conference, a small event hosted in Downtown Orlando. The event had the focus of, “Celebrating web development of today and how we got here”, and I think that it delivered quite nicely. One of the reasons that I attended the event is…

  • david’s Favorites of 2019

    david’s Favorites of 2019

    I’ve seen lots of “13 Best Whatevers of the Decade” posts going around, but I decided to limit to a few of my favorite things that I personally consumed in 2019 only, whether they were made last year or not.

  • WordCamp US 2019 Recap

    WordCamp US 2019 Recap

    My friend Allie Nimmons asked recently if anyone would read a WordCamp US 2019 recap were she to publish now, and the feedback was highly positive. So much to the point that Allie published her WordCamp US Recap that same day, and inspired me to write one myself. I am not quite as quick as…

  • An Incomplete Guide to Getting Started on Mastodon

    An Incomplete Guide to Getting Started on Mastodon

    Last week I wrote an article about misconceptions around Mastodon and the Fediverse. I got a lot of great feedback from that article, but I also got one question a lot: what is Mastodon, exactly? I didn’t want to address this in that article, as it’s worthy of a full post of its own. I…

  • Misconceptions About Mastodon and the Fediverse

    Misconceptions About Mastodon and the Fediverse

    I’ve been re-reading some articles about Mastodon from early 2017, right around the time that it started to get some mainstream notice. I signed up for an account on mastodon.social around that time and launched tech.lgbt that same month, and relaunched it less than two months later in June 2017. I’ve been a supporter of…

  • Decentralization of Language on the Web

    Decentralization of Language on the Web

    I’m currently reading Gretchen McCulloch’s new book, ‘Because Internet’, which serves as an overview of linguistic study of the evolution of written (and sometimes spoken) communication brought about by the mass adoption of the internet. Both McCulloch and I implement one of the changes noted earlier on: the word internet has lost its capitalization over…

  • WordCamp Boston Recap

    WordCamp Boston Recap

    WordCamp Boston was easily one of the best collections of talks I’ve attended at any event over the past few years.

  • Squeezing More Performance From My Site

    Squeezing More Performance From My Site

    One of the things that I handle for clients at FixUpFox is site speed optimization. I also help with performance optimization, which I almost lumped into this post, but I think that it deserves its own overview at a later date. I also began blogging more regularly on this personal site, thanks to the support…

  • What is WP_DEBUG for and how do I use it?

    What is WP_DEBUG for and how do I use it?

    Turning on WP_DEBUG will allow you to see PHP warnings, notices, and errors so that you can fix them in your code.