Manage Tasks in Outlook: Flagging Emails as Tasks

My primary goal for switching to Microsoft Outlook was so I could track requests that I send to co-workers through email. If I don't flag the requests shortly after sending them, there's a good chance that I'll forget to follow up. Let's take a quick look at how I currently use Outlook to stay on top of these types of requests. [Continue reading]

Manage Tasks in Outlook: Categorizing Tasks

When I originally looked for a way to manage tasks, I tried Microsoft Outlook's built-in feature. The problem was that there didn't appear to be a way to assign tasks to other people. Well, that turns out not to be the case. Let's take a quick look at how I currently organize tasks. [Continue reading]

How to Test Form Submissions: Using Google Chrome to Change Form Values

When forms are set to the POST method, it may not be apparent how you can test responses made through fields like radio buttons. Of course, you can click each radio button to make sure each individual value can be submitted. But how do you make sure that someone can't tamper with the form and submit an invalid value. Let's take a look at how the browser can help. [Continue reading]

How to Test Submissions from Forms that Use the POST Method

An important part of developing online forms is testing. One area of testing I've always wanted to better with is making sure input types like radio buttons can't accept values which are not allowed. In this week's post, we go over my primary method of testing. That way we can discuss a faster way next time. [Continue reading]

Lessons Learned: Outputting Shortcode and Plugin Results

If you look closely at the documentation for WordPress Shortcodes, there is a specific way to output content to the screen. Of course, this is a part of the documentation I skipped while developing my first plugin which lead to some baffling results. To help save you time, I wanted to share one last lesson learned from writing my plugin. [Continue reading]

Lessons Learned: How Not to Name Shortcode Attributes in WordPress

Developing my first WordPress plugin provided me with many learning opportunities. We already talked about the quicker way of uploading plugin files. In this post, I wanted to share the problem I had with shortcode arguments. Hopefully it will help you avoid the same issue. [Continue reading]

Lessons Learned: Quick Way to Upload Custom WordPress Plugins

While writing my first WordPress plugin, there is one thing I wish I would have known sooner. Much of the early development time was spent zipping, uploading, activating, and deactivating files. There was a lot of monotonous work that is easily avoided. Let's take at quick look at how. [Continue reading]

My First WordPress Plugin: Generates a Bulleted List of Clickable Blog Post Titles

I recently helped with a redesign that involved building a website with an out-of-the-box WordPress theme. The theme met our needs for the most part, but we were looking for something to dynamically generate an FAQ page from blog posts tagged with "FAQ". After trying some third-party plugins which didn't quite work for us and attempting to modify the theme files directly, I decided it was time to build my first WordPress plugin. [Continue reading]

Year-End Review and Goals for 2015

It's hard to believe that another year has passed. I hoped to have more accomplished, but there were a few unexpected twists throughout 2014 keeping me busy. Nevertheless, let's take a look at how my 2014 goals turned out and see what's coming up for the new year. [Continue reading]

Open Offline PDFs in Adobe Acrobat Instead of Reader

Since upgrading Adobe Reader, PDFs stored on my computer have been opening in Reader instead of Adobe Acrobat. This isn't a problem when I just want to view a PDF, but there are cases where I need to modify a PDF. If I need to add a document title, for example, the PDF has to be opened with Acrobat. So I've been going through some extra steps to open PDFs in Acrobat for editing. However, there is an easier way. [Continue reading]