January 10, 2012 - Reading time: 3 minutes

WordPress is so popular that it is taking over — it’s behind 22% of all new sites on the internet, but this sets a dangerously poor coding standard. Our infrastructure is crumbling!

Yes, this is a rant. My beef today is this: the WordPress manager might be easy to use, but under the hood, it sucks. There, I said it. It’s awful architecture and it has taught thousands of web developers that it’s Ok to write piss-poor code. This has single-handedly dumbed-down a whole generation of developers by setting a bad example. WordPress is the junk food of coding standards: ubiquitous, tastes good, but lacking any nutritional value.

I’ve ranted about WordPress before but what put me over the top today was the Suffusion Theme. It looks like a clean layout, so I thought I’d give it a try. Holy flaming monkey balls, was I in for a shock! Read more

December 30, 2011 - Reading time: 10 minutes

Help! I gotta keep track of everything I gotta do! There is help available to track your projects, you just got to know where to look.

A lot of developers, designers, students, and even web-hobbyists have a lot of items on their to-do lists for any particular site or project. You have to remember to fix that one CSS glitch, or rewrite a page to use some new function… the lists can be long and daunting. If you’re like me, you’re likely to forget half the stuff you need to do, and if it weren’t for project management software, I might as well stay in bed.

To put it mildly, there are *a lot* of applications out there that help you track bugs and manage projects, and this article only looks as a handful of them. Although the general purpose of these web-applications are similar, there are substantial differences in the pricing models, features, and usability, and hopefully this article will help you identify an application that is right for you. Or, if you’ve never really thought about using one before, maybe this article can help show you why project management / bug tracking software is good to have around. Read more

December 24, 2011 - Reading time: 9 minutes

GoDaddy sucks… their dashboard is completely un-navigable, their shared hosting has repeated errors, their VPS hosts are so poorly configured that they can’t even run updates on themselves, their CEO murders elephants for his own amusement, and they think that a few Superbowl ads featuring Danica Patrick will somehow make us forget how bad they suck. And now this…

You may remember my earlier comparison/rant of VPS Hosting Providers. GoDaddy was on that list of hosts to avoid, but recent events have loaded my arsenal with rant-fuel and I cannot contain myself any longer: GoDaddy is a horrible web host and a terrible company that not only wastes your time and money, it may actively be trying to F you in the A! Read more

September 25, 2011 - Reading time: 6 minutes

The last article I wrote about this topic was criticized as being heavy-handed in my complaints about WordPress, so in this article, I am revisiting the topic from the other side of the fence. There are things about WordPress that are great, and there can many good reasons why you’d choose it as your Content Management System.

Ease of Updating

WordPress has done a fantastic job of making its product easy to use: each time there is a new version of WordPress, it takes only the click of a button to update your site. MODx still requires an FTP connection and an FTP client that can merge directories, otherwise, the upgrade can be hairy indeed. Unless you’ve got a really nice FTP client like Coda or you’ve got SSH access and you’re comfortable using cp -fr, then MODx can’t compete… MODx-ers will have to wait until version 2.2 or 2.3 when MODx will offer seamless upgrades.

WordPress also lets you easily upgrade all your plugins with a single click. MODx Revolution introduced package management, so you can see which plugins need updating, but it’s still not as streamlined as what WordPress offers. Read more

April 22, 2011 - Reading time: 11 minutes

Following up on an article I wrote a couple years ago on Free Online Invoice Software, I wanted to write a blurb about paid online billing software. My business has grown, and I was spending more and more time dealing with invoices. So it was time for me to actually pay for the software that pays me. Seems kinda silly doesn’t it? I was so uptight about spending money on software that actually pays me. So I spent a few hours with each of the programs below, and well… you can read about what I found.

* Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4 Read more