Tims musings and pontifications

Blog and Articles

An eclectic mix of how-tos, insights and musing from Tim. From security to community and everything in between there is something for everyone.

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Removing Google Analytics

General

Tim discusses why he has removed Google Analytics and justifying it beyond the fact he wants to go hide in a cave and wear a tin foil hat.

New Site Part 2 – Development Workflow

General | WordPress

In part 2 of this series Tim introduces the workflow behind Timnash.co.uk a ramble through how the site is developed a glimpse into his personal workflow and development practices and why he doesn’t always do what he preaches.

New Site Part 1 – Design & Performance

General | WordPress

Tim introduces the new Timnash.co.uk look, discusses some of his “unique” design philosophy before looking at how he shaved nearly 2 seconds off the sites load time. He looks at how making the site fast has become an important part of what the site is. Right down to swapping out favicons in the name of performance.

Who is afraid of the big bad talk…

Who is afraid of the big bad talk…

Events and Talks | WordPress

Tim writes about his recent talk at WordCamp London, its hopefully an honest post which not only guides people through his methodology but exposes many of the mistakes he made during his talk.

Coming from Linux to Mac

Coming from Linux to Mac

General

Tim takes a look at the Mac tools he uses everyday that he thinks his friendly and colleague Keith a Linux sysadmin will find useful with his new MacBook Pro

Lets say bye bye to default themes

WordPress

I’m going to preface this with I actually tend to like the Twenty XX themes that come bundled by default with WordPress. Takashi Irie both folks I admire. I have no doubt it will be a fantastic usable and accessible theme. However I don’t think it should be in core, I don’t think we should […]

Getting PhantomJS working with Codeception in < 5 minutes

WordPress

While getting a friend to look over a Codeception video series I’m preparing to release, he noticed that my tests, automated the starting and stopping of PhantomJS. I pointed him at a cool extension and off he went. Unfortunately Codeception like many projects assumes you are using Composer to manage extensions while promoting a very […]

Defence of Post Formats

WordPress

I’m going to make a confession I actually like Post Formats, not the silly implementation made as part of an ill-conceived and bolted attempt to appeal to get tumblr users to WordPress.com but the post formats of the future the ones where they actually are useful. Post Formats have had a pretty ugly existence since […]

HTTP2 With Nginx & nghttp2

WordPress

So good news the HTTP/2 spec was finalised recently, meaning soon the way we talk to web sites will fundamentally change and yet no one will actually notice. Partially based on SPDY Googles attempt to speed up the web, HTTP/2 will start to make the web a lot faster. The HTTP/2 spec, introduces a few […]

Using Neo4j to give WordPress some relationship advice

WordPress

It would have been a glorious moment for Conan the Barbarian, as he trampled over the orcs, having picked up his might Long Sword +2 and with his bash skill along with his strength modifier he had +6 to the strike. With Rincewind timely casting of the Raise strength  spell it would double to […]

Going Beyond Unit Tests – WordCamp London 2015

WordPress

WordCamp London has been brilliant, but I’m shattered, so have thrown up the slides here For WordCamp London 2015 I talked about testing tools, that go beyond doing unit tests, which not only help in different situations but at least for me are more interesting and dare I say it fun. It’s really interesting giving […]

It’s time to get out of the pub

Events and Talks

On Wednesday WordPress Leeds will be having our first coffee morning called Coffee and Cake  it’s an informal gathering during the day open to anyone. While this is not unique Open Coffee has been around for years across the world it is rare for tech events to happen in the day time. There is […]