After weeks of speculation in what has been the worse kept secret, Facebook has announced that it is changing its name to Meta. When they say name change, they, of course, are referring to the corporate umbrella that is the company, not the facebook.com social network.
The move is akin to Google rebranding to Alphabet and other companies like BP renaming to Beyond Petroleum. Except, in the case of Google, they didn’t rebrand to escape controversy like Facebook, BP and Phillip Morris have done.
When I started as a developer, the term front-end developer was almost nonexistent. Let me pull up my old man socks while I regale you with stories of a simple time in web development when Node.js wasn’t even in the womb yet, and Microsoft was not the open-source friendly company they are today.
It used to be a badge of honour to have a W3C validation badge on your website. Developers used to spend ridiculous amounts of time getting their sites compliant with XHTML/HTML as per the spec. I am talking about alt tags, proper semantic use of HTML elements, putting widths on images, everything.
In the world of software and web development, you might have heard of the term 10x engineer. It’s a term that refers to a person who can increase productivity and get work done faster on a team than other developers. It’s a term people often misuse to describe a team member who can do the work of ten people or work ten times faster.
In other words, someone with a rare set of skills and talents makes them more productive and makes them far more valuable to their employer.
If you haven’t heard the news, PayPal (aka the devil’s payment processing company) is allegedly in late-stage talks to acquire Pinterest. But, the question I’m sure many are asking is: why?
Why does PayPal want to buy Pinterest? Why would Pinterest be entertaining such a low offer at $70 per share which would value the deal at approximately $45b when Microsoft offered a $51b deal in early 2021? It seems a little low unless PayPal is going to offer stock as part of the deal.
Semiconductor shortages aside, a chip arms race has been brewing in the background of the pandemic over the last few years. Even before the pandemic, large companies were already exploring their own custom fabrications to reduce costs and dependence on dominant chip suppliers.
For years, just a handful of chip companies have dominated most facets of the chip market, from the chips inside of your modems or wireless devices to graphics cards, mobile phones, gaming consoles, and any other modern gadget with a chip inside of it.
I love WordPress. To me, WordPress is comfortable. I am familiar with it and have never encountered a situation where I couldn’t make it accommodate my use case or needs.
In the years that have passed since WordPress became the dominant CMS, a few other CMS’s and frameworks have come and gone, threatening to take WordPress’ mantle (it still hasn’t happened).
Some elitists out there believe that WordPress is underpinned by spaghetti legacy PHP code that makes it a non-option for some. Most of those against WordPress are more opposed to PHP itself than the CMS.
While sorting an array of objects recently, I needed to sort by an identifier prefixed with two letters and ended with numbers. An example is “AQ110” — you might be tempted to reach for a library, but you can achieve this in Javascript with very little code.
Say hello to localCompare.
I had a list of values that looked like this:
AQ2 AQ110 AQ19 AQ190 AQ64 AQ5 The lettering didn’t matter so much, but the numbers did. By default, just using a plain old .sort() will not be enough. If you were to use .sort() by itself, it would get tripped up on high numbers starting with the same value (eg. 10, 110, 11 and so on).
Did you know WordPress Multisite got some powerful new functionality in WordPress 5.1, allowing you to query sites by meta values?
This functionality allows you to query sites in a WordPress Multisite network by meta values and other query-based syntax to get back one or more locations.
Like many who develop WordPress websites, I use the awesome Advanced Custom Fields plugin. What ACF Pro gives you is powerful field functionality that really should be core functionality in WordPress itself.
I’ve been working on a WordPress Multisite installation that is going to eventually have upwards of 20,000 sites. Somewhere around the 50 site mark, I noticed the WordPress admin panel was beginning to slow down. And, after some investigation, I discovered the “My Sites” menu in the admin bar was part of the problem.
Using the admin_bar_menu action hook, we can bind to this admin bar (like most things in WordPress), and remove items we don’t want to show.
If you’re working with WordPress Multisite, you might encounter a scenario where you want all uploaded media to share the same folder. In my case, I needed all sites to use the same uploads directory as the parent site.
As with most things in WordPress, there is some hook or filter you can use to change core WordPress functionality. For the upload directory, there is a filter called upload_dir which is called when the upload directory is configured.