Author: Joe McGill

  • A WordPress filter to avoid widows in your titles

    When you’re a designer who codes (or a developer who designs), you end up obsessing over stupid things like making sure you don’t end up with widows in your titles (a single word that wraps to a new line). Here’s a small filter you can throw in your functions.php file to replace the last space in your…

  • Coach Welker

    I would guess that almost everyone has a favorite teacher—an individual who impacted their life in a profound way. I’ve been fortunate to have several such teachers, but today my thoughts are on one in particular. Jeff Welker was a high school history teacher and football coach. A man deeply dedicated to his profession and to the…

  • Reflections on 2014

    I’ve never been much for resolutions, per se, but I do think it can a good idea to reflect on the year that just passed before barreling headlong into a new one. In that spirit, I thought I would jot down a few professional milestones from the previous year. Public speaking One of my goals for the…

  • A local WordPress setup using VVV

    Setting up a local development environment for working on WordPress projects can be complicated. Varying Vagrant Vagrants (VVV), along with a few addition add-ons, makes it a bit less daunting to get up and running today.

  • Setting Up WordPress on DigitalOcean

    I’ve recently had the need to explore a few different hosting environments and decided to give DigitalOcean a spin. Here’s a quick look at the steps involved in getting WordPress set up on a LEMP Ubuntu 14.04 droplet. Setting up the Droplet The initial setup was pretty easy after signing up for a Digital Ocean account. I…