While diagnosing a potential unconfirmed problem with a certain popular WordPress plugin I did something that every good developer should do every once in a while, which is to humble themselves and read the most basic and obvious documentation for the simplest parts of a language or framework that you…
Drupal
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Drupal Status Color Codes
This has bugged me for a long time. If you visit any project issue page on Drupal.org you’ll find a bunch of different color-coded table rows. What the heck do the colors mean!!! It has always bothered me, but today I decided to finally dig in. This process wasn’t hard…
Drupal
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You have requested a non-existent service “media_entity.cli”
We upgraded a Drupal site to 8.7 that had used media_entity previously and we needed to get it converted over to core’s media module. We followed all of the directions but we kept running into the error: You have requested a non-existent service “media_entity.cli” After a bunch of trial and…
WordPress
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WordPress CSV upload problems
Just an FYI, the WordPress 5.0.1/4.9.9 (and others back to 3.7.x) security update broke uploads for CSV files under certain circumstances. The trac ticket is here and the workaround is here. This note says that it will be addressed in 5.0.3 which will probably correlate to 4.9.10 (unless 5.0.2 also includes…
HTML
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I hate Font Awesome like I hate jQuery
First off, if you don’t know me then you might be offended or enraged by that statement. Please, keep reading. Font Awesome is a truly great collection of icons that can be easily deployed with a simple CSS or JS include. A ton of work has gone into it to…
Plugins
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WordPress, rel canonical missing
We’ve got a site with WP SEO and WPML that we needed <link rel=”canonical” /> on but we couldn’t get it to output no matter what we tried. First, we actually usually disable that tag on most sites so we checked that it wasn’t us. Good there. Second, we poked…
UniFi Controller, Let’s Encrypt and “This site can’t provide a secure connection”
You cannot use import_cert to import a cert created by Let's Encrypt. That command is instead supposed to complement and finish the new_cert command. However, if you did accidentally do this, in your data folder (which on my Linux box was /usr/lib/unifi/data) there should hopefully be a keystore.before_import file that you can copy back…
Ramblings
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A font for machine instructions
No, not a font for programmers, or at least not directly. This is a font for actually encoding machine instructions. For instance, the standard programming constructif is composed of the ASCII codes 0x69 and0x66(or Unicode U+0069 and U+0066). This singular concept takes two codes to write and uses a language that's only spoken…
Accessibility
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Detecting touch support with JavaScript
Don't. Or do, but don't do it exclusively. Don't lock yourself into the "touch version" of your site and the "mouse version." When you bind an event handler, don't do a if( 'ontouchstart' in document.documentElement){…}else{…} because many devices these days are both touch and mouse-enabled. The video below does a…
Ramblings
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Satellite radio
This weekend my trial of satellite radio ended so I decided to subscribe. Luckily, I had a mini supercomputer (with flashlight) in my pocket and after touching the glass a bunch of times a signal was sent to a bunch of metal rods stuck in the earth. Those rods sent…