Tag: code
Don’t Mess Up Prod
I created a simple WordPress plugin called Don't Mess Up Prod, which adds a little environment indicator to your admin bar. If you flip around between multiple environments (local, dev, staging, prod), you might find it useful. It has definitely saved me a few headaches. This was also partly an exercise in releasing a plugin...
Restoring the elements of user experience
Some human-centred practitioners have been consigned to increasingly superficial considerations. Artificial intelligence presents an opportunity for us to bring the focus back to the fundamentals that make our work important and successful.
Draw me like one of your JSON files
In Pixel Pushing, Redux I rebuilt this site with Claude Design over a weekend and £23.84, then handed off to Claude Code for the WordPress build. One thing intrigued me when setting up the design, Claude Design's first pass was to set up a design system, you can import assets and it will set up...
Post With Code
Pushing Posts to the Atmosphere
feat: syndicate Astro posts to ATProto via standard.site and Bookhive
Markdown my words
Markdown for Agents and Statistics is now a WordPress.org plugin — pre-generated `.md` files served to AI crawlers via content negotiation, with stats on who's actually reading.
Pixel Pushing, Redux
Claude Design dropped on a Friday. I played. This site redesign is the result - some time over the weekend, £23.84, and a lot of thoughts about design systems, source of truth, and whether the tension between design and engineering has really gone anywhere.
Thoughts on slowing the fuck down - Mario Zechner
Mario Zechner with a much more measured take on how to use the new tools we all have at our disposals.
Cookie jarring
Cookie banners have been around for a long time and Cookies even longer. But why? First the obligatory bit about, no not those type of Cookies… Cookies are small text files that a website saves onto your device, used to remember information about you or your visit - like that you're logged in, what's in...
How to read and write application logs
Writing logs is important: they are the story of how your application is doing what it does.
Changes to tabViewBottomAccessory in iOS 26.1 are Fixed in iOS 26.2
iOS 26.1 introduced an infuriating change to the tabViewBottomAccessory behaviour that is fixed in iOS 26.2.
🧟♀️ Digging up the past 🧟
I’ve been working on WordPress since the Friends era, so I’ve built up quite the graveyard of projects - and decided to see if AI could bring one back to life.
These 2 guys
These two lines of 11ty code have really helped me increasingly over the last year or so // Read and parse the WP theme.json file const themeJSON = JSON.parse(await readFile(new URL('./theme.json', import.meta.url))); // Add theme settings to Eleventy global data eleventyConfig.addGlobalData('theme', themeJSON); I love design systems and I try where possible to stuff as much...
More Programming Thoughtleadership re: dependencies
I'm still thinking about this thing that everyone pretty much decided to stop thinking about in 2019.
Good system design
Very slowly getting system design through my Thick Skull and onto the surface of my Smooth Brain.
Picking on third-party deps
I'm a computer, stop all the npm installing
It’s hard to speculatively load what tomorrow may bring.
It appears the shiny new WordPress version 6.8 comes with Speculation Rules out of the box. This is a really interesting optimisation feature, enabling us to programmatically tell the browser (Chrome) to get pages ready for the user to visit. It's pretty dense and complex, but potentially a great optimisation option. Basically it behaves as...
You’ve got style(guide)
One of the pages on this site is a style guide(book) that I tend to include on most of my projects. I find it useful for the client and sometimes designs to see clearly how the core styles for the site are set up. Sometimes I receive a style guide as part of the design...
Your Dependencies Are Not Free
Dependencies are free chunks of functionality, except when they're not. They come with hidden costs which need careful consideration.
Megalithic Portal
The extremely competent autocomplete machine made me a map of all of the best Rocks in the area. Remind me never to take the extremely competent autocomplete machine for granted again.
We need some focus
The WordPress block editor generally gets better and better. One great example is the Cover block. I have tended to build out custom hero components previously but honestly this is becoming less necessary as the cover block becomes my go-to method of creating hero sections. The ability to add a large image (or video), some...
Aider
I've finally figured out how to make a robot write the code that allows me to make robots do other stuff for me.
Hello, GOV
I really really love the GOV.UK design system, and the Frontend framework that enables it GOV.UK Frontend. It's an absolute tour de force of a design system tested on 68.35 million people1. It's battle hardened, robust and accessible. Essentially it's the gold standard for common components and form design. It follows Government Design Principles and...
Inquirer.js
Moving content from WordPress to a static site often means wrestling with complex command-line syntax. We found a cleaner way: using Inquirer.js to streamline the entire export process into one simple, interactive command.