On this day, 4 years ago, I started full time with Automattic. This is my 4th Automattiversary.
I had already been on trial for 5 months by that point (since January), and had a good feel for the company and the other Automatticians. I knew it was where I wanted to be. So I accepted the offer, and became a fully-fledged member of a relatively small team (I was employee number 35) that was bringing blogging to the people (amongst other things).
In the four years since then, a lot has happened and changed.
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10 years ago today, I posted my first blog post on this site. That’s pretty much forever on the internet, and I think it probably also makes me old. A lot has changed in the last decade, both on this website, and for me personally (and the world at large). Let’s have a quick look shall we?
dentedreality.com.au
When I first created this website, I was using a little tool called blosxom to manage the blog. It was a tiny little Perl script that pulled the contents of your blog from text files on your filesystem. Pretty awesome, nerdy stuff. Dented Reality also looked something like this, pretty hot huh?
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I’ve started putting together a Developer’s Guide to working with Keyring in your WordPress plugins and themes. Check it out.
If you haven’t seen Keyring yet, then check it out at the WordPress.org Plugin Repository.
I used to maintain a wiki full of personal ideas using DokuWiki, but at some point just gave up with wiki syntax entirely. A few months ago when I was moving all of my sites and content over to a new server and trying to consolidate things as much as possible, I decided to import all of that old content into a WordPress install (which was actually a single site within the same Multi-site install that runs Dented Reality). I ended up writing the following super-rough script to just scrape the contents of the pages and throw them into WordPress. Scraping the pages meant that I could get the actual output of all plugins etc, and also get full links between pages.
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I’ve made a bunch of updates to WP Email Login (local project page) recently, and it’s still rocking along. If you’d prefer to log into your WordPress install using the email address associated with your user account, you should check it out.
I’m working on a new WordPress theme (for this site, and it’ll be released for download once complete). The theme is deeply integrated with Jetpack, and one of the things I wanted to do was have the Jetpack Sharing buttons appear in a location other than the very end of the content. Normally they are applied as a filter on the_content, so they just appear right at the end. I wanted to relocate them into a different location, and it turns out that’s really easy to do with the power of jQuery.
jQuery( document ).ready( function( $ ) {
// Relocate Jetpack sharing buttons down into the comments form
jQuery( '#sharing' ).html( jQuery( '.sharedaddy' ).detach() );
} );
The #sharing selector is just the DOM location where I want to move the buttons to, and the .sharedaddy one is the container that Jetpack places its buttons in normally. We just detach it from the normal position and then dump it into the new location exactly as it was.
Developers seem to love to hear about how other developers work, so I thought I’d try to capture my entire environment, from end to end, in a single post. This will change (has changed) over time and depending on the project/company/whatever, but this is how things are for me right now. A couple of points up front:
- I work for Automattic, so a lot of this is influenced by our internal policies/security/workflow.
- I don’t always use all components of this “system”. I’ll try to detail when I do/don’t use certain parts of it as I go.
OK, here goes.
Note: This turned into a little bit of a summary of how we work internally at Automattic as well. Oh well, maybe it’ll provide some inspiration, I think we do some pretty cool things.
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