Updated on /Originally posted on Squeezing every last drop of performance out of your website on any platform is an always-changing, never-ending, often addictive battle. Among the several tactics you can employ in this fight, leveraging resource hints is a modern approach that can yield some significant ROI -- with preloading is a particularly impactful...Read It
If you're making modifications to the functionality of your WordPress site or application, there are generally two places where people put the code to do it. A theme's functions.php file. A plugin. Given the choice, which option should you almost always choose? A plugin. Why? The list of reasons is...Read It
Updated on /Originally posted on When I started in development, beginning a new project often felt like drowning and then being asked to write some functioning JavaScript. At the time, all I needed to do was perform some DOM stuff — make an element disappear on a click, add some classes, or animate a dropdown....Read It
Updated on /Originally posted on When you're looking to incorporate any given feature into your WordPress application, there's rarely a shortage of third-party plugins out there to make it happen. But sometimes, whether you're trying to avoid the inevitable complexity an unfamiliar third-party plugin introduces, or for some other reason, you might feel called to...Read It
Updated on /Originally posted on A while back, I wrote my first Lambda function with Firebase. Like every Lambda function tutorial on the web shows you how to do, mine processes a payment via Stripe when someone purchases a license for TypeIt, the most versatile JavaScript animated typing utility on the planet. The process was...Read It
Securely handling personal information on the web is a pretty big deal, and one of the ways you do that is making sure none of it's sent via query string in a URL. Things like this are bad: https://your-site.com?email=booger%40email.com In fact, Google has some clear policies explicitly prohibiting certain information...Read It
If you've been a developer for more than 7 minutes, you've probably felt uncomfortably pressured into doing something weird with your code, like specifically styling plain, classless, attribute-less elements. Don't ask for the details, just accept the reality of this happening sometimes. When I meet scenarios like this, by default,...Read It