ohryan.ca

A Web Developer in Winnipeg

  • Today I Block Ads

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    Marco Arment just published a post on The ethics of modern web ad-blocking.

    His opening position is pretty similar to my own, I’ve been a long time advocate of not blocking ads. In the past, I have also put food on the table via ad revenue. Until today, I have been morally opposed to blocking ads has until today.

    However…

    Nobody could blame the users of yesteryear for killing pop-up ad rates, and nobody should blame the users of 2015 for blocking abusive, intrusive, misleading, and privacy-stealing ads and trackers, even if it’s inconvenient for publishers and web developers.

    PS. Ghostery is great!

  • Using Jetpack’s Photon CDN to host images in custom WordPress themes

    Using Jetpack’s Photon CDN to host images in custom WordPress themes

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    Photon is a great free image CDN that you can use with any self-hosted WordPress install via Automattic’s Jetpack suite of plugins. Photon uses wordpress.com’s infrastructure to host your site’s images on one of the fastest CDN globally.

    I highly recommend enabling it on every WordPress install. If your site is on cheap shared hosting, it will dramatically improve page load times. If you’re hosting a huge news site, it’ll save you loads of money.

    By default, Photon automagically serves any images embedded in or attached to a WordPress post or page. Including feature images, galleries, third-party sliders. Due to the nature of WordPress hooks and filters, it’s not possible for photon to grab images stored in post meta fields, or any images that are part of theme template files.

    I’ve written a gist that exposes Photon’s CDN wrapper as a simple function you can call in templates:

    Relevant Jetpack documentation. 

  • Trump

    Trump

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    (This is not a political post. I don’t really do politics.)

    The vast majority of people I follow on the social medias are having a very predictable knee-jerk reaction against Donald Trumps presidential campaign. My knee-jerk reaction to predictable, like-button-induced, knee-jerk reactions is to immediately take a contrarian view.

    If I actually did politics, I’d continue this post by going on to describe that contrarian view. But, I’m not nearly well versed enough in US politics to make even the weakest coherent argument about why I think The Donald should be taken seriously.

    Instead, I’d like to recommend Episode 295 of Dan Carlin’s Common Sense podcast. He’s far from a pro-Donald guy, however he’s got a very unique take on the man, that every single bandwagon jumper needs to hear.

    —

    Update, Dec 2015:

    At some point between August and now, Donald Trump became completely indefensible. I stand by my podcast recommendation and I still believe people are being too quick to gobble up everything the media is feeding them with regard to Trump. However I want the record to be clear, I certainly do not support Donald Trump for president of our fine neighbours to the south.