aka, how Slack can change the meaning of the majority of my reactions with a small UI change.
The Power of Emoji in Slack 👍
Join us for the Via Lux Anomaly!
Via Lux? Anomaly? If you don’t know what any of those words mean, you haven’t read my post about Ingress yet. Go take a look, I’ll wait!
Now that you know everything there is to know about Ingress, let’s talk about anomalies.
Family Weekend
Walking the dog, blowing bubbles;
posing for our yearly family pictures;
visiting a local aquarium, where we could discover sharks through an observation tunnel and even touch rays.
This weekend was good. And since my wife is a great photographer, I have great shots to remember all of this! :)
Batteries are now recharged. I’m ready to go back to questions about Stats. 🙂
Manage your Custom Post Types on WordPress.com
I’ve talked about the WordPress.com REST API on this blog before. I even created a plugin allowing you to make use of it on your own site. This API powers WordPress.com, the desktop WordPress.com apps, and is used in more and more areas of the Jetpack plugin.
Did you know that API also allows you to manage your Custom Post Types via the WordPress.com interface?
Waffles: my mother’s recipe
Waffles were always a tradition back home. In the winter, we used to make them at least once a month, on Saturday nights. Everyone would get a first waffle with butter and Coulommiers cheese; then nutella / whipped cream, nutella / banana / whipped cream, jam / whipped cream, jam / Coulommiers, butter / powdered sugar, chestnut spread, … I know, I know: not exactly what you’d call a healthy dinner, but so damn good.
In a way, that family ritual was as important as the galettes (buckwheat pancakes) my grandmother makes for the whole family for lunch on Saturdays. But that’s a topic for another post.
Naturally when I moved to Hungary, I did my best to convince Adri we needed to buy a waffle iron. ☺️ Fast forward a few years, we now have our own waffle ritual: every other weekend, my little helper and I make waffles (or pancakes) for breakfast.
A custom theme for SyntaxHighlighter
I’ve used SyntaxHighlighter Evolved on that site for as long as I can remember. It was always my plugin of choice to display code on this site. I’ve played with other tools, like Prism.js or Pastacode, but I’ve added so many code snippets to this site, it wouldn’t be easy to switch to something else now. Let’s see how I customized that plugin to fit my needs.
On Repeat Today: Battlestar Galactica
It’s hard to believe I haven’t posted about Battlestar Galactica on this blog yet. It is one of my favorite TV Shows, and I love the soundtrack. I often listen to the whole Season 3 OST on loop, for the whole day.
Automating my local dev environment with Laravel Valet and WP-CLI
When I set up my new machine, I decided to get rid of MAMP and Vagrant, my previous local development tools of choice. While they worked well for me, I needed something a bit different. I need to be able to spin up a fresh installation of WordPress, run a few tests, and burn it all down a few minutes later.
A few months ago, I discovered Laravel Valet. Valet is a tool relying on Caddy and Dnsmasq, allowing you to spin up PHP projects in a few seconds. You can learn more about it here. It seemed like the perfect tool for me, so I decided to combine it with WP-CLI to quickly launch WordPress sites on my laptop.
Let’s dive into the different steps I follow to get this to work.
Got a new machine? Hit the ground running with Homebrew
I just got a new computer, and wanted to install everything from scratch instead of copying data from my old machine. However, I didn’t want to spend hours going from site to site, downloading disk image files, opening them, installing a software, deleting the dmg file, and so on. Luckily, Homebrew and Cask were here to help! Here is the shell script I came up with.
The Americans — the best drama on TV right now
Have you watched The Americans? Somehow this series stayed under my radar in the past 3 years. I guess there are just too many good shows on TV these days, and not just on major networks anymore.
If you haven’t started watching it yet, I’d recommend watching it soon; you’ll love it.