Technology

WordPress Development with XAMPP, Gulp, and SASS

10 minutes to read — 2100 words

WordPress Development with XAMPP, Gulp, and SASS

One of my main programming projects is development of a complex site powered by WordPress, but I’ve never put together a description of my workflow. I build the site on my Windows box using XAMPP and Gulp to manage everything. It’s surprisingly difficult to find a good explainer1 on how to set this up, so this post will explain how I get my WordPress development environment up and running.

The Windows Setup: 2023

6 minutes to read — 1069 words

The Windows Setup: 2023
Every once in a while, I like to write about how I set up my various devices and the software I use. This is mostly for me, so I can easily set stuff up again in the event of a crash, loss, or new purchase. But some of it may be helpful to others looking to emulate some of this.

7 minutes to read — 1308 words

Adding a list of related posts to web pages is a great way to help users find new content and keep visitors engaged on your website. I was recently adding this feature to a website built on WordPress. There are several WordPress plugins that implement related posts functionality, but I wanted precise control over the function and styling of the related posts. I also didn’t want the overhead and hassle of installing a new plugin, so I implemented the related posts feature myself.

Transit Passes on Google Wallet Are a Disaster

5 minutes to read — 880 words

Transit Passes on Google Wallet Are a Disaster

Expanding public transit in the United States is crucial, and integrating technology into existing public transit systems is important, too. Over the past couple of years, many of America’s public transit systems have been implementing digital wallets—namely Apple’s and Google’s—by permitting riders to use virtual transit passes rather than physical plastic or paper ones. That seems like a great idea: it cuts down on waste, you don’t have to worry about losing or forgetting a physical card, and they should be easy to manage right in the wallet app. Unfortunately, the implementations so far are terrible, and I’m switching back to plastic.

Development on Windows is... Good?

4 minutes to read — 714 words

Not that long ago, most people would laugh if you told them you did any serious software or web development on Windows. All the serious coders used Macs, except for the handful who ran Linux. I was in the latter camp; as someone who’s never liked Apple products, I installed Debian on a clunky Compaq laptop in 2003 and was immediately hooked by the idea of running an open source operating system. I don’t really run Linux much any more, though, because in the past few years, Windows has become a functional, even good, development platform.

ProtonAOSP on Pixel 6 Pro

5 minutes to read — 1032 words

One of the best things about Android, the world’s most popular operating system for mobile devices, has always been its customizability. For the truly adventurous, that’s often meant ditching your manufacturer’s preinstalled software and installing a custom ROM, essentially a third-party operating system. In recent years, it feels like the popularity of custom ROMs has declined as manufacturers and carriers have made it harder to install them, and improvements to Android have made the advantages of a custom ROM less obvious.

Snap Apps Crash Silently Due to Cross-Filesystem Symlinks

4 minutes to read — 716 words

This won’t mean much to many, but there seems to be a small number of people stymied by a weird problem: some Snap apps won’t work on Linux. You install a Snap app, and it might work the first time you launch it. But every subsequent time you launch the app, nothing happens. There’s no error message or indication that anything is wrong; your app just won’t start. If you run snap run appname in your terminal, you won’t see anything, either, but the app still won’t launch.