jameslau.com

  • Boston WordPress Meetup Experience

    So I don’t remember when the last time I attended a Boston WordPress Meetup was, but it was definitely a time before COVID hit and when Microsoft kept their large amphitheater seating open. We all sat in bleacher-style wood seats while watching the presenters give their talks.

  • Notes to Myself

    Ever find yourself confused in the middle of a project and having to Google things all the time? Yes, we all have been there. This is not new. Well, this advice may sound obvious, but a developer should write notes, or blog about it for their own sake.

  • Disabling WordPress Theme and Plugin Editor Options

    As far back as I can remember with the use of WordPress, every admin user has the capability to make changes to the theme or plugins through the Theme File Editor and Plugin File Editor. This is a dangerous access point if a client decides to venture into this section. Historically, and through experience, it…

  • Wrangling With WordPress Database Prefixes

    About a week ago, I was tasked to migrate a Disaster Accountability Project’s website from Bluehost to Namecheap. Migrations are usually seamless if the provider(s) allow some symbiotic connection between the two. Case in point: when I worked with Educate Radiate Elevate, they moved their server from a UK-based system to A2 Hosting.

  • WordPress WordCamp Rochester Experience

    It started with a rainy Friday afternoon in Massachusetts, literally. It was the same storm surge that hammered New York City that same weekend, causing massive floods in the city. It took me nearly an hour to drive out of Massachusetts due to the slow traffic. But once I hit the open roads of Upstate…

  • Nonprofit Website Story And Setups

    Let me just put it out there, volunteering your time for someone or an organization is a good thing. Yes, sometimes the work may come with no incentives (money). This might be a dealbreaker, but as I have highlighted in a previous article, volunteering as a web developer is no different than building code and…

  • Trending Tech: HTMX

    I first heard of this technology from Siegfried, deploy! podcast, episode #41. Didn’t think too much about it until another recent article came up in my feed today from Infoworld. This got me thinking about the uniqueness of HTML attributes again. In the past attributes have been used for a variety of things for the…

  • Attending WordCamp Rochester, New York 2023!

    As you may already know, I have been a huge fan of WordPress since college. I’ve used the platform since 2008 and have fond memories over the past decade-plus, working on my own WordPress client work or tinkering with projects at an agency.

  • Understanding What Point Release Means Within A Development Cycle

    The first time I’ve ever heard of this terminology was during a WordPress Meetup event. Developers were discussing the upcoming changes with WordPress 6.3, five days before the initial release. New tools, new user interfaces, and security enhancements that may or may not make it into the production release. I, however, was Googling “point release.”…

  • The Constant Gardener

    The last known statistic about WordPress is that it runs 44% of the web. That’s a lot of websites out there! Even with the growth of SAAS platforms like Squarespace, Wix, Webflow, etc. WordPress takes the cake. One major proponent to this is that it has a large open source community who keeps the core…