ohryan.ca

A Web Developer in Winnipeg

  • Hei Opera!

    Hei Opera!

    in ,

    Opera was the first web browser I truly loved. In the early days of the modern web, when we had 4 or 5 real legit competitors in the browser space, Opera was truly innovative. In the year 2000 it was the first browser to support tabbed browsing  (2 years before Mozilla, 3 years before Safari and 6 years before Internet Explorer!). It was also the first browser to implement a built-in pop-up blocker around the same time. Mouse gestures may have been my favourite feature of Opera back in the day. You could to navigate the web by drawing shapes with your mouse (“J” for back, “L” for forward). Might sounds a little silly in 2016, but in the early 2000s multi-button mice were not common-place and OS supported trackpad gestures were unheard of.

    I can’t recall exactly how long I used Opera or when and why I left. I suspect it was around the time that Mozilla’s Phoenix became the shiny new Firefox.

    Over the past few weeks Opera has been making some small ripples in the tech press. Opera is doing a few related interesting things. So I thought I’d give it a try again after all these years.

    For the past two weeks, Opera has been my primary browser on desktop, I’ve also tried out their iOS browser and free VPN.

    Briefly on the mobile experiences.

    Opera Mini is fine. iOS browsers are somewhat limited by being forced to use Apple’s rendering engine, so I wasn’t really expecting much. Opera mini has a “turbo” boost feature. By routing media request through an Opera system, image and video file sizes and be optimizes, improving page load times. I can’t say that I noticed the feature. However I’m not a heavy mobile browser user.

    Opera’s free mobile VPN (with build-in ad blocking) is a great step in the right direction, public wifi (especially in hotels) is sketchy AF! I had the prefect opportunity to test this out on a 5 day vacation last week. Unfortunately, it fell short, the internet was slower and my battery drained faster with the VPN enabled. I don’t know if Opera’s technology it to blame, if it’s just the nature of VPNs in general, or even if it might be my perception. I turned it off entirely after 1 day of usage.

    My desktop experience on the other hand, has been great!

    Opera dropped their own proprietary rendering engine in 2013, in favour of Google’s WebKit variant, Chorium. This means the developers tools, browser extension support and overall rendering is identical to Chrome. And this is a good thing!

    Screen Shot 2016-05-22 at 8.08.28 PMUsing Chorium as a platform to build on allows Opera to focus on adding features. For now, their main feature is built-in ad block. It’s good, quite good. It’s not configurable like a dedicated ad block extension, but it get’s the job done.

    Opera also plans to release their free VPN solution for the desktop browser. I’m not sure when I’d use this (my desktop sits behind a network I trust), but this is something you’re unlikely to ever see from Google, Microsoft or Apple.

    Overall, Opera is great and I think I’ll continue to use it as my daily driver.

    Give it a shot, if only for the nostalgia.

  • Dear WordPress Get Your 💩 Together

    Dear WordPress Get Your 💩 Together

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    Dear WordPress.org,

    Get your shit together!

    It is 2016, there is no excuse for allowing any plugins with insecure code to make their way into the plugin directory. Full stop.

    The story about Custom Content Type Management stealing admin credentials and other shenanigans, is utterly pathetic. I’d bet this incident is just the tip of the iceberg.

    If there is a plugin review process, I have seen no evidence of it. In my experience, plugin updates are made live immediately after updating the repo, regardless of if the plugin has a site crashing bug or a security issue.

    The plugin directory situation has gotten so bad that people are starting to avoid installing free plugins.

    Fix it. Please.

    Sincerely,
    Everyone who loves WordPress

    PS. I stole the emoji graphic from the great article on The Oral History of the Poop Emoji.

  • The Role of Developers in the WordPress Community

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    Earlier this week, influential British designer Sazzy wrote a blog post entitled The Elephant In The Room about the depressing state of freelance web design. While not directly related, her post got me thinking about the current plight of the back-end developer inside the WordPress universe.

    Over the past 3 or 4 years I’ve focused my work around custom WordPress development. In that time, in spite of (or maybe because of) WordPress’ meteoric rise to popularity, I’ve found interesting backend development work in WordPress to have almost completely dried up.

    I believe this is largely because WordPress is mature, stable and has little need for serious back-end developers.

    Core Contributions

    Earlier this year, I took it upon myself to get a patch into WordPress core. I logged into the WordPress slack daily, watched conversations and dug around TRAC to find something I could contribute back to the community.

    In doing so, I came to learn that the core contribution team seems to be a well defined clique of developer who have been there a long time. Breaking into the little club is not easy. Based on my digging around in TRAC is looks like most feature requests are met with bureaucracy and bickering, as tends to happen in nerd forums. More serious issues are already adequately handled by long-time core contributions. The slack conversations are dominated by a few voices who really know what they’re talking about.

    Don’t get my wrong, the core contribution community is not unfriendly and none of the things I encountered are bad, per se. I simply got the impression that there’s little room and little need for the average developer in the core contribution team. WordPress is mature and stable, so is the development team.

    Plugins

    Simply put, most common and many uncommon features/problems/use-cases have been solved by well-established, mature, stable plugins. Most of the more popular plugins are supported by businesses that have sprouted up around them. Not only that, but Automattic seems to be spending even more resources developing plugins — as saw just this week with their AMP plugin.

    A few years ago it might have been possible to start a cottage business surrounding a custom developed plugin that solves a popular problem. Something you could implement on all your development client’s sites, while selling support or premium services to the general public.

    Today, those unsolved problems are few and far between.

    Themes

    The theme marketplace is bananas. There… are… just… so… many… themes and a lot of them are technically quite bad. But all that clients need are pretty pictures, slick demos and a low price point. It’s very difficult to sell the average mom & pop on the merits of a custom designed theme. To be honest, a lot of the time there is little value to be gained.

    At the end of the day, custom themes are a non-starter for a large portion of the potential clients-base that the average freelance developer could expect to encounter. There are certainly cases where a custom template could be part of an overall design/branding strategy or something to that affect.

    WordPress as a CMS

    WordPress has always been and still is a bad choice as a general purpose CMS. But that’s a post for another day.

    So, what’s left?

    In my experience over the past couple of years, there are two related roles being filled by professionals who make their living in the WordPress universe.

    The Expert

    The WordPress Expert is someone who stays up-to-date with WordPress. They know about key features in the latest release; they maintain a personal list of goto plugins to solve various problems; they have preferred theme vendors and know how to spot a bad theme just by looking at it and they’re just really good at using WordPress.

    The WordPress Expert can set you up with a website from start to finish, without ever touching a line of CSS or a PHP template. They act as a liaison between a clue-less client and the confusing world of websites. They can troubleshoot most issues, if not, they’ll know who to call.

    The Customizer

    The WordPress Customizer has all the skills and knowledge of The Expert and on top of they are usually a skilled front-end developer, with some basic back-end knowledge. They know what a child-theme is and aren’t afraid to use one.

    When an off-the-shelf template doesn’t quite fit a client’s needs, the client will end up hiring a Customizer. The Customizer is able to wrangle the theme, bending it to meet he needs and wishes of a particular client.

    At the end of the day, this type of customization can often be hard to maintain. Being a good customizer is not always an easy task. But The WordPress Customizer can be a reasonable solution to provide budget conscious clients a more customized website.

     

    Over the years, my roll has morphed into that of a customizer. I enjoy the work, but it doesn’t really scratch my programmer itch. Calling it “web development” seems like a stretch.