I’ve been making heavy use of Grunt in all of my projects lately. One thing that I always find annoying is that I can never figure out where the latest output from the Watch task begins and ends. I find myself scrolling up to see just what’s been happening. Luckily, Grunt makes creating new tasks a snap and so I made one to help make very clear where the output from the last Grunt run begins. I’ll give you the code after the jump.

I’ve recently set up a couple of Ghost blogs to see what this new platform is all about. Ghost bills itself as a simpler Wordpress alternative for people who want to focus on writing. It received a lot of press, got funded through a Kickstarter campaign, and now has a handful of corporate sponsors backing it. Having seen its evolution from the time it was announced through the first beta to the version currently available today I have to wonder if Ghost really is worth anyone’s time. TL;DR: Ghost is overrated. Wordpress isn’t going anywhere.

I’ve been struggling for over a month with Wordpress Multisite (aka Network) crashing Apache every time I go to the Network Settings or General settings pages. At first I was convinced that it was a plugin issue but after much research and testing it turns out that you need to be very careful if you configure an FTP user for plugin and theme installation in your wp-config.php file. Here’s how to fix the issue:

According to Larry Wall there are three great virtues a programmer may posess. Basically, it says you have to be kind of an asshole to be a good programmer. I’ve met and worked with enough programmers to want to say that might just be true. But it’s definitely not a virtue to be an asshole. So try not to be. If you’re interested in what the virtues are then go ahead and click on through.

The Real Favicon Generator is a great tool. It takes your one large icon and turns it into a PNG or ICO suitable for every browser and platform on the planet. Plus it gives you the code to paste into your site. The problem is, it’s sixteen lines! For a favicon! There’s something wrong with the world when you need to bloat your HTML with 16 <link> tags just so you can have a pretty favicon on mobile, Windows 8, and a few other browsers. But I’m not in charge so I reluctantly stuck those sixteen lines into a partial and dutifully included them at build time. Lame.

This is stupid.

If you’re coming to Node from a different server-side language like PHP you may find that deploying Node apps into production is weird, scary, and confusing. What’s with all the command line tools and the weird setups you need to do on the server?, you may ask. You may be used to dropping a few files into a public_html folder on your server and expecting them to “just work”. Well, not to worry. Publishing Node apps into production is different but once you understand how they actually work all those weird steps you have to take start making perfect sense. The better you understand how Node apps work the more comfortable and confident you’ll be when it comes time to deploy them.

If you use a Git hook to deploy your projects you might have run across the problem of accidentally deploying the wrong branch. This can easily be resolved by adding a check in your post-receive hook but what if you have a project that you build locally before deploying and your dist folder is not under version control? I wrote a quick inline Grunt task to guard against accidentally deploying the wrong branch. You can use this code directly within your Gruntfile. I may roll this into a plugin in the future.

So you have a new MacBook and you know what HTML5 is. You self identify as a programmer or developer or designer or, hacker. You’re the resident “tech person” at home and at work and one day your boss asks you to build him a new website. This plants the seed of an idea that’ll grow into the poisonous plant of a thought. You’re going to be a “web designer”. You’re going to have a website and business cards and, yeah, a “real business”. Please save yourself and everyone else the trouble and don’t do that. Before we get into why you shouldn’t, I’ll be the first to admit that I have been guilty of most of the mistakes I’m about to call out. So if you feel offended or find you’re guilty of some of these, don’t worry. The point isn’t to make you feel bad, it’s to give some perspective and hopefully plant the seeds of some better ideas.

It’s New Year’s Eve and website owners everywhere will be calling up their developers asking them to update the copyright year on all of their websites. It’s your job to update the copyright notice but this is the year you finally realize that simply displaying the current year isn’t enough. You need to show the year the site was created up to the current year (e.g. “2001 – 2015”). On top of that, you’ve got a mix of static HTML and dynamic PHP pages. How does one dynamically generate a copyright notice on a static page? Easy: JavaScript with a fallback or PHP depending on your stack. If you use any other language the code will be roughly the same with some syntax differences thrown in.