Blog
Kite Day
At the start, I was surprisingly optimistic. It had been a hard month, a hard year really, with graduate school and two jobs leaving no time for my daughter, and this sounded like just the thing to make it up, to make it right. I called in sick to work.
Bird
One Saturday afternoon I took the family to the lake, where my 9-year-old daughter found a baby bird abandoned on the rocks. She's helpless around anything that needs tending, that kid, which is why I didn't bother objecting when she cradled the downy body in her hands and immediately headed
How to use Zapier to extract all URLs from a text source
Here’s a nifty trick for pulling all of the URLs out of text with a Zapier javascript code action. Using this, you can extract URLs from any Zapier text input. For instance, you could use the Zapier email trigger to pull all of the URLs from an email message,
Auto tweet new WordPress posts with categories as hashtags in Zapier
Automatically sending tweets for new posts on your WordPress site is a simple task with Zapier. Recently, though, I wanted to add hashtags for each category assigned to the WordPress post and include that in the tweet as well. Can Zapier accommodate this? Yes, it can, although it turned out
Should you enable automatic updates in WordPress?
One of the headline features in the recent release of WordPress 5.5 was the ability to enable automatic plugin and theme updates. This follows the inclusion of automatic core updates in WP 3.7. On paper, the arguments for automatic updates are compelling. They’re the fastest and most
Three tips for testing and debugging javascript in Zapier code actions
Zapier is bar none the handiest utility in existence for automating online workflows and connecting different online services. This was true even before the introduction of custom code actions, which allow you to drop in blocks of javascript and python code to manipulate data in your zaps, and it’s
Introducing Well Adjusted, a new podcast about horror movies and culture
I can’t remember the first horror movie that I saw. I started young — too young for today’s ninny standards — by dragging my babysitter to the local video rental store during my parents’ weekly outing and insisting I was allowed to watch whatever. Whenever she balked at a particularly
How photography helped me recover from depression
Early last year I bought a new camera. I'd been a casual shutterbug at various times before, but always wound up quitting within a few weeks or months. This time, though, was different. This time, the perfectionism and anxiousness and preordained sense of defeat that clung to every previous snap
