Code, Design, Various things
Today is a very solemn occasion for America, as it’s the 17th memorial of the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. I thought it might be a good time to write about something other than programming and web design for once.
As a developer who sometimes dabbles in designs, I can’t even begin to describe how sick I am of rectangles. Because of the limitations of CSS, almost everything in websites is wrapped in a rectangle that is wrapped in other rectangles. Even designs that incorporate circular images and content wrappers align them in rectangular grids. The css clip-path property will help somewhat, allowing rectangles to be masked into other shapes, but the fundamental grid remains rectangular. Until now. (more…)
Recently, I’ve been seeing a lot of posts on reddit telling users that they can do whatever they want with WordPress themes and plugins, and demand or pirate free copies of paid themes and plugins, because they’re all GPL licensed. Unfortunately, this isn’t the whole story. I figure it’s time to clear the air about how this all works.
Note: I am not a lawyer, and one of the most important things to take away from this article is that you shouldn’t make your own legal interpretations without the support of a lawyer, specializing in intellectual property law. (more…)
Recently, I started using the WeGlot WordPress plugin to translate a client’s site. I’ve been happy with the service so far, but it was frustrating to continually need to switch back and forth between the WordPress dashboard, and the WeGlot dashboard, just to populate content. To make things easier, I added a button to the WordPress admin bar, that links to the WeGlot visual editor for the current page being viewed. I’ve found this makes client training much simpler. (more…)
I’ve been critical of WordPress’s new Gutenberg editor since day one, primarily because of its “HTML+comments as structure” language, and I’ve blogged before about the importance of context-aware rendering of blocks, but with the complete lack of complex block layouts in the initial set of beta Gutenberg blocks, It was hard to show people a hard and fast example of how HTML as structure is insufficient in the real world.
Then the columns block was released. (more…)