WordPress

I recently came across an article by Rory Cellan-Jones about a new technology from Jigsaw, a development group at Google focused on making people safer online through technology. At the time they'd just released the first alpha version of what they call The Perspective API. It's a machine learning tool that is designed to rate a string of text (i.e. a comment) and provide you with a Toxicity Score, a number representing how toxic the text is.

The system learns by seeing how thousands of online conversations have been moderated and then scores new comments by assessing how "toxic" they are and whether similar language had led other people to leave conversations. What it's doing is trying to improve the quality of debate and make sure people aren't put off from joining in.

As the project is still in its infancy it doesn't do much more than that. Still, we can use it!

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We kicked a poll off three months ago asking y'all what kind of local development environment you set up for running WordPress locally. At the time of this writing, we got 2,623 votes, so a decent amount of significance here. Especially because the question was phrased:

If you're running WordPress locally (i.e running PHP, MySQL, and a web server), how are you doing it?

Presupposes that you are running a local environment. (Please do that.)

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Most WordPress themes show user Gravatars in the comment threads. It's a way of showing an image with the user, as associated by the email address used. It's a nice touch, and almost an expected design pattern these days.

Every one of those gravatars is an individual HTTP request though, like any other image. A comment thread with 50 comments means 50 HTTP requests, and they aren't always particularly tiny files. Yeesh.

Let's lazy load them.

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I just gave a talk at WordCamp Miami where I talked about, to some degree, how WordPress has been a great choice for CSS-Tricks over the last decade.

If I get a chance I'll try to re-give the talk to my computer locally here so there will be a way you can watch the talk with some real context.

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I really have no idea how this will turn out. I suspect a ton of you have run or are currently running WordPress locally, but I have no clear guess on what the most popular way is to do that right now.

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Of all the projects I've worked in the last few years, there's one that stands out as my favorite: I wrote a WordPress plugin called Great Eagle (Tolkien reference) that allows my team to install and update themes and plugins from our private Bitbucket repos, via the normal wp-admin updates UI.

This plugin has blasted our dev shop through the roof when it comes to development best practices, in ways we never expected or intended. It forces us to use proper version numbers because now we can't deploy without them. It forces us to store our work in Bitbucket because now we can't deploy without it. It forces us to use the command line en route to deploying our work (by which I simply mean, git push origin master), which then led to us using phpUnit. Now we can't deploy unless our tests pass. We've arrived at the nirvana of test-driven development, all because we started with the unrelated step of deploying from git.

If this all sounds standard and obvious, great. I'd love a chance to learn from you. If this sounds like exotic rigmarole, guess what? This article is for you.

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