This presentation, by Kyle Simpson , is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0

Web components allow you to encapsulate recurring sections of your page like widgets, alert buttons, etc. One of their other advantages is giving CSS a scope to work in. Any CSS that’s applied to the component inside the file ( ie alert-component.html ) will be applied only to elements in that file.

That’s nuts. Read on, fair traveler:

CSS: Everything is global and how to deal with it

HTML5 Rocks: Shadow DOM 101

W3C: Intro to Web Components

Rather than build cages, and lock our employees in them, I’d rather build gauges and passively monitor them. If someone is slacking off, it will come out through the natural course of daily work, interaction, and collaboration with each other.

8Bit: Gauges, not Cages

When I show the boss that I have finally fixed this bug

And another:

When my regex returned exactly what I expected

Many thanks to Sonny for sharing this with me. Check out part 1 and part 2.

I remember being 12 when I first encountered CSS and HMTL. It blew my mind, and at the time, was absurdly complex. I was “journaling” on OpenDiary.com and it allowed you to modify your own css and html structure. I was learning Front End while pouring my heart out about why my latest crush didn’t like me.

12 years later I’m making my living as a Front End Web Developer. Between messing around with computer parts found on the side of the road, building websites, and fantasizing about the latest gadgets, it seems my life has centered around computers. And it’s crazy how much it’s taught me, my little obsession. I’ve learned that ropes can remember things. I’ve learned that blind people can see. And I’ve learned how motorcycles work. Why motorcycles? Because I’m interested in them! If development has taught me anything, it’s to pursue learning what I’m interested in and find out how things work. Interest begets learning.

It’s also taught me problem solving. That’s something I thank my Dad a lot for teaching me. Problem solving has been one of the best skills I’ve ever had because it doesn’t just apply to web development; problem solving applies to life. I never realized until years after the purpose of math in grade school: to teach logic and problem solving. The problem is I never gave two shits about math, so I wasn’t very good at it. I wonder what would have happened if they taught us development in high school, how would that have changed things? And what about other kids that don’t think they’re good at math or other subjects? When you learn development, you’re not only learning logic and problem solving, but you’re able to create something. I find that far more valuable than figuring out the (some mathematical formula).

And that’s why I feel like I’m a modern day superhero. I can create something out of thin air. I can type on my keyboard for hours and hours and create something. I can mash data together like nobodies business, and most of my friends have no earthly idea what I’m doing. Coding for me is about creating something from a problem. How about you? How has coding made you a modern day superhero?

For the life of me, I could not figure out what it was, until today. I was looking at all the taxonomies and noticed that these 3 particular taxonomies all had longer names than the rest. Not much longer, but longer nonetheless. After Googleing for some time, I stumbled upon a StackExchange post talking about this very subject:

The name of the taxonomy. Name should be in slug form (must not contain capital letters or spaces) and not more than 32 characters long (database structure restriction).

There it was. My taxonomy names were too long. Hopefully you’ll find this answer a lot sooner than I did.

• http://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/17435/where-can-i-find-country-borders-data-in-human-readable-format
• http://hub.qgis.org/projects/quantum-gis/wiki/Download#3-MacOS-X
• http://www.kyngchaos.com/software/qgis (Don’t forget the requirements!)
• http://thematicmapping.org/downloads/world_borders.php (This is where the shapefile for all the world borders are)

I promised I’d get a blog post out today, so here goes! Recently, I had a client project that required all sale items be pushed to the beginning of the products page. With a little bit of creative coding, and manipulating a few queries, I got it to work. Here we go:

/**
 * Sale Products Up Front 
 */

add_action( 'woocommerce_product_query', 'cur_sale_products_up_front', 10, 2);
add_filter('posts_request', 'cur_modify_products_query', 10, 2);
add_filter('loop_start', 'cur_reorder_sale_items');


function cur_replace_text($startPoint, $endPoint, $newText, $source) {
    $regex = '#('.preg_quote($startPoint).')(.*)('.preg_quote($endPoint).')#si';
    preg_match( $regex, $source, $matches);
    $newText = $newText . $matches[2];
    return preg_replace($regex, '$1'.$newText.'$3', $source);
}

function cur_sale_products_up_front($q, $this) {

    if ( isset($_SESSION['orderby']) && $_SESSION['orderby'] == 'menu_order' ) :
        $q->set('meta_key', '_sale_price');
        $q->set('products_query', 'true');
    endif;
    return $q;
}


function cur_modify_products_query($request, $object){
    if ( ! empty( $object->query_vars['products_query'] ) &&  isset($_SESSION['orderby']) && $_SESSION['orderby'] == 'menu_order' ) :
        global $wpdb;
        $new_orderby = $wpdb->postmeta . '.meta_value+0 desc, ';
        $request = cur_replace_text('ORDER BY ', ' LIMIT', $new_orderby, $request);
    endif;
    return $request;
}

function cur_reorder_sale_items($query){

    if( ! empty( $query->posts ) && $query->query_vars['post_type'] == 'product' ) :

        $posts = &$query->posts; 
        foreach( $posts as $key => $post ) :
            $sale_price = get_post_meta($post->ID,'_sale_price', TRUE);
            if( !empty( $sale_price ) )
                $sale_products[$key] = $sale_price;
        endforeach;

        if( !empty ($sale_products ) ) :
            arsort( $sale_products);

            foreach( $sale_products as $key => $post ) :
                $sale_products[$key] = $posts[$key];
                unset( $posts[$key] );
                array_unshift( $posts, $sale_products[$key] );
            endforeach;
        endif;

    endif;
    return $query;
}