10 minutes to read — 2100 words
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.
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.
7 minutes to read — 1287 words
In my various posts about developing static websites, I’ve pointed out that some critical functions can be tricky to implement. One example is pagination—splitting a long list of posts across several numbered pages. This is a nerdy deep-dive into how pagination works for two popular static site frameworks: Gatsby and Hugo.
7 minutes to read — 1375 words
6 minutes to read — 1166 words
About a month ago, I wrote about developing a static website with server-side Javascript. As I discovered, there are a lot of advantages to a static site. But one of the disadvantages to the lack of a database is that it isn’t obvious how to make the site searchable. With no database to pull from, generating search results can be a challenge.
Rather than pull search results from a database and generating results pages with server-side scripts, static sides tend to opt for storing results in a single file or external database and relying on AJAX to submit queries of the search index. That’s easier said than done, though. Every time you update the site, you need to rebuild the index (whether it’s a JSON file or a database hosted somewhere else). Then, when your users are actually searching the website, you need to set up the AJAX calls to the index and transform the response into a user interface.
12 minutes to read — 2409 words
I’ve experimented with server-side JavaScript in the past, but I finally had an opportunity to dig in and actually build a website with it. I have a lot of experience with JavaScript in general; one of my major professional projects over the past few years was developing a complex web application entirely in JavaScript. For a number of reasons, I had to work only with vanilla JavaScript (no frameworks or libraries like jQuery). But server-side Javsacript is an enitrely different challenge.