In order to improve marketing and responses to follow up emails, I created a feature in the Google Sheets tracking software we use to record issues found in a clients website that automatically sets merge fields in MailChimp that can later be used in automated email campaigns. This was done for The Blog Fixer,…Read More
Programming conventions and best practices are continually changing. When programming features for your company’s project, you may be tempted to implement the newest process in the feature you’re working with. Unfortunately, I have often found that with deadlines, or just the amount of refactoring that would be required to implement a new way of doing…Read More
If you’ve ever done any kind of commission or service work for many people, and at some point started to outsource or hire out that work, you’ve probably experienced the stress that comes with depending on other people to make sure work gets done in a timely manner. There’s always the chance someone will forget…Read More
As part of my job scanning and fixing many WordPress websites, I go through a lot of repeated tasks. Sometimes, I will scan as many as a hundred websites, each website requiring steps for marking down different bits of information. One thing that takes a bit of time that I really want to automate, is…Read More
Something that’s commonly used by Scrum teams are User Stories. They’re used as a way to keep development concentrated on solving an issue rather than developing a feature. Often times they result in the same things. For example, a user may want an extra setting in a script for automatically making links in an article…Read More
My mom needed 250 discount codes created to go onto product labels as a bonus gift, and they all needed to be unique. She uses Shopify for her online store, and uses Shopify’s product discount codes. It would’ve taken forever to manually generate each code, as each one had to be unique and required some…Read More
Both as a resource moderator for SpigotMC and working for a business that runs website SEO scans, I’ve found that there are a lot of repetitive tasks. Most of these involve filling out details in a form. For example, about 75% of the reports on resources for Spigot plugins were “invalid”. Either they were making…Read More
I was recently taken on for a startup that specialized in finding SEO related issues in WordPress blogs, and they had a very interesting setup. Google Spreadsheets allows for fairly complicated scripting, with a language based around JavaScript. You can create buttons, make HTTP requests, and generate data with it, among other things. The startup…Read More
When working with other people on a Git repository, you’ll eventually encounter merge conflicts. This happens when two people attempt to make modifications to the repository, causing one to be pushed while the other must either replace the changes made by the first or somehow merged. The easiest way to avoid merge conflicts is to…Read More
Something that’s in demand for every project being developed is configurability. These days, everything needs to be changeable. Languages, layouts, themes, colors, everything. In some projects, though, simply having a config file to load key values from is not enough. Sometimes people want to add simple scripts to their system, usually for automation.In the project…Read More