Timeline

The other day I installed Fedora 34 on my laptop so that meant having to redo all the things I had already done. The biggest change was that I didn’t install Steam or Docker. I may need to do that down the line again but for now it’s not really needed. Steam is not really a priority since I use my Windows 10 machine for that instead and my laptop is mostly for random projects I really want to learn from.

I did, however, have to re-install my Vim and powerline as well; I did also install tmux because I wanted to learn something new and a little different to me. The one thing I did want to venture more into was customizing the look of the terminal’s prompt and that’s where powerline comes into play here. It is nice knowing that I’m able to do that with a few files but I do want to be doing my own take on it. I was able to find a good start point and how that works as well from a tutorial I found. The cool part being is that it is fairly straight-forward to follow. It’s something even I could do.

The reason I’m posting about it is because I want to keep the momentum going in my motivation in doing more code related things. When I saw that it was dealing with Python code my little heart lit up and did a super happy dance. This was one thing I really wanted to do for some time so this will really be handy.

Now, the other reason I wanted to write this out was because I wanted to document one thing I did come across. When I installed tmux all the things were fine. Tried it out and had some fun learning some of the commands. Once I did that I went ahead and installed that on my work laptop. This was where things went a little wacky.

It was fun trying to troubleshoot my own screw up here.

Really. It was.

What ended up happening was when I updated and installed tmux (using brew) it had updated all the installed packages as well. The strange part being it had removed one which was actually needed for the yubikey I use for work. Yeah, not entirely sure why or how that really happened but it did. The other thing I noticed was that it broke my powerline installation since it was pointing to an older version of Python now. The funny part being that I forgot that I had originally installed powerline using pip3 so I kept getting an error because I kept forgetting the 3 at the end of the command.

Yep.

It really was that simple to fix. Just adding a 3 to the command when I went to re-install powerline on my work laptop.

I’m definitely looking forward to making a more customized terminal prompt with some Python code. Now if I could only find a way to create time for all the other things I want to work on that would be great.

The other day I tweeted out that I was looking for articles on GitHub Actions. What I got was a list of resources that I still have not been able to read over just yet and part of the being that I just haven’t gotten around to really diving deep to those.

I will read those. I will.

I just need to really make the time to fully read and even try some of those things out.

You might be wondering why. Part of the reason is that I would love to be able to get back to reviewing themes but I also don’t want to be reading the same code from several years ago. And a lot of that code really hasn’t changed it’s just been the CSS and maybe how things get done.

The other thing is that I’ve been trying some online courses that I’m really hoping will pay off in the future when it comes to code.

Now, the reason I’m writing this out is so that I can get a list of starting resources. At least something to chip off the old list of things I wanted to get done this year.

The list follows:

• GitHub Actions Docs
• Bluehost sample repo
• WP GraphQL Code Standards
• WP GraphQL deploy to org
• WordPress core workflows

Yeah quite a few code examples but the first one being the documentation from GitHub so that will be the first one to really go over. The next step for me will be creating a random repo and documenting my experience here.

It will be fun and a little painful but an overall great learning experience for sure.

The other day I started another random little project. I’m actually very excited about this one because I know that I will be using it from time to time. The other reason I’m happy is because it can be a useful one for others as well.

For quite some time I’ve been doing a lot of support related things and I love it. I do. There are moments when I feel a little out of touch or behind but that’s probably imposter me thinking. Anyway, from time to time I have to share or ask to share some information and at times it can be a thing like a password. Now, there are some services available in the wild but at work it doesn’t always mean it would be a good thing.

The thing on that is that using a 3rd-party system can be sort of a bad thing since you don’t have control of the data. This can mean maybe creating your own version of said thing. Well I did that. I took a repo ( PrivateBin ) and am slowly building out a site for what I hope to be mostly internal use.

It was a little to get things up and running at first because this was somewhat new to me. I had to dive into some of the code to see how things work, which I haven’t done in a really long time. That’s the one thing I really do like doing too. The other part is getting it all styled to the way I would like. That’s the part I’m really looking forward to the most now. I have an idea of what to do and use so I’ll have to look at how to handle that. I did see the code and do understand how it gets loaded too so this really will be fun for me.

And the other part is also that I’m trying to follow that mini community as well and other projects that I try out or have so far. The other day I even tinkered with Stage and Sage because I wanted to understand more of how the framework did things. It was super neat to see how all the things loaded and how it broke. Yes, I broke things along the way.

It was fun doing that.

This project so far has been pretty fun. I’ll have to keep that momentum going too if I really want to get this fully going. The next thing is getting the template going. Time to open up Photoshop and Illustrator now.

Today I went to try and clean things up a little bit since I haven’t really done that in some time. At least it feels that way to me. I looked at the comments and realized there were some in the trash. I didn’t think much of it since you know it’s just trash.

There was one time where the comment was from a real person so that was also part of the reason I went and looked.

I saw there were quite a few being posted on images. I thought a little odd but not too crazy since those are to an extend considered posts. Or at least a post type. Yeah. About that.

So I wanted to see how I could just mass disable all of those without having to resort to a plugin because that’s always the solution, right? Not having to use a plugin is the best thing in the world. You would think.

Anyway.

So I set to figure out a filter and of course there was one. I didn’t want to go that route since I honestly wanted to try something a little different. So I tried to see if it could be done using a query. A database query to be a bit more exact.

The cool part was that I really was able to do that and for my site it really only took about less than a second to do. There were only about 75 or so media files that had an open setting. Well, attachments to be precise on that.

The reason I say “attachment” is because that’s how WordPress stores that information in the database. For those who may want to do the same, the query I ran was:

UPDATE wp_posts SET comment_status = "closed" WHERE post_type = 'attachment' AND comment_status = 'open';

The cool part was that it ran really quick since it was directly connecting to the database. The even better part was that I didn’t have to create a plugin for that though I think I may have to at one point down the line if I forget to change that setting when I upload another image.

I don’t know.

Creating a plugin may just be quicker down the line too. I just don’t want to do the maintaining thing I guess.

The other day I wanted to start a new project, experiment thing to to learn how something worked. I got totally distracted and forgot what I wanted to work on. This seems to happen more and more lately too since there are so many things I really want to learn. I get so distracted with reading about those things that I forget to actually even start the thing.

I did finally start the one thing I did say I wanted to start though and that is to learn a new programming language. For the last 3 months I’ve wanted to dive into something new. A lot of that being because I actually like to know how things works and communicate. That was one of the bigger reasons I wanted to learn PHP and JavaScript.

The other day I jotted down on a piece of paper what I wanted to learn and because the way my brain decided to work the next day I wound up looking up random NodeJS things and that wasn’t even what I wanted to look up. It was in fact the Go language.

I began a course on it and what is super nice is that I am glad I did. There are somethings that I felt very comfortable with and some which were new to me. This was a great feeling. I do miss that.

The part that really caught my attention the most was I had already completed two courses on the site. One was SQL and the other being React. To be honest I forgot I even took the React course so that made me chuckle a little bit.

I think the reason I really liked it was because I do see a lot of the similarities between all the other languages I’ve wanted to learn and have learned.

I was able to get through at least half way done with the course today so that was a good thing. I’ll have to get back to it throughout the week and hopefully do more down the line too.

The other day I swapped out the theme here because the upcoming Twenty Twenty One theme was introduced. It is still being developed and worked on so that means I do expect some of the things on here to break. I’m used to things breaking though.

For those who do want to either follow along with the development or contributing then I would recommend going to: https://github.com/wordpress/twentytwentyone

The other thing I’m trying to do is follow along with the notifications project. Reason being I do want to contribute to this one more. The WordPress notification system is something that has been needed for a long time. If you want to contribute to that, please go to: https://github.com/WordPress/wp-notify

The team does also meet every Monday morning in Slack if you wanted to chime in as well.

The other day I was trying to understand something and began to search the web. This lead me to a random rabbit hole because isn’t that usually the case with a lot of things too?

The thing I wanted to understand more was MySQL because there are things I know I don’t really know. I want to know more though. I do.

So I went and began to search for a book to read or even a video to help me understand a bit more. I wound up getting a book. I went and got Understanding MySQL Internals. I’ve read the first two chapters so far and am liking it so far. Part of the reason is because it dives more into the code of MySQL. The functions, the classes, and files used.

It really wasn’t what I was expecting but I love that. I guess you can say it almost rekindled my passion for reading those books again. It’s been too long since I’ve read a book like that and it’s been because I just didn’t think much about it.

Honestly, that is the biggest reason I haven’t read much either when it comes to those type of books. The other being that some are just not my type of read. I need to pick up more of those books though. I still haven’t finished reading one from a few years ago. Not sure I will though.

The other day I was wanting to experiment with FSE.

Sigh.

Yeah. A bit of a weird term. Acronym really. More to the point another thing that may just confuse a few more people. The reason I say this is because it stands for Full Site Editing.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m looking forward to this. I am. The reason being is that it may help a lot of people in creating their sites to suit their wants. The how is the part I’m kind behind on. I haven’t completely kept up with many of the things being done.

Why now?

The reason I’m posting this now is because some time ago I was reached out to by member of the Theme Team. I haven’t done a theme review in a long time. I mean that too. I haven’t actually looked at theme’s code for things in quite some time. Part of that is because I do have a few other things I was doing. I spent most of my free time just relaxing. It’s something I haven’t really been able to do. The other reason being that I never really set a schedule for outside of work so any free time would be anything.

With that being said, I went and tried to setup something on my local installation. This hurt a little because I opted to not install a lot of things. I wanted quite literally the bare minimum to just get up and running. I installed XAMPP and boom. Got things working in under maybe 30 minutes.

I mean it wasn’t much.

1. Install Gutenberg
2. Activate Gutenberg
3. Enable Full Site Editing

Not much to it. Now the other part that took a bit longer was actually seeing how I could maybe partake in contributing with either docs or code.

Let the fun begin

This part was a little more. More time. Okay, like almost an hour of trying to install one thing to make everything work. Now, you’re probably asking or even wondering, but Jose, why not use something like VVV or Docker to set up your environment?

Again, I wanted the bare minimum to just start. This is where things actually took a bit of a turn. I did already have NodeJS installed so that was sorted. I already had Git because that was one of the other things I installed when I got my Windows machine fully built. The things I needed were:

1. NodeJS
2. Git
3. Python

Yeah. Python.

In all honesty I’m not sure if that was one thing I did the first time I set up my local machine which a very long time ago when I was first starting with WordPress. I might have done it when I wanted to learn random languages I know that much but don’t really recall doing that times after that. It might be because after switching to something other than Windows, Python might have already been installed and running.

Anyway.

The part I that I really wanted to experiment on was following the guide on getting the Full Site Editing experience going. Part of that reason I do still like dabbling with code when I can. At least when it comes to WordPress theming code. Plugins I still just love to look over how they work and break more than anything.

Now, I’ve been doing things like this for some time but it really did feel like something was missing when I was following the steps. It really almost felt like I was out of the loop with how things worked. There were some things I had to actually read in order to understand what was going and how to do it.

The part I am really looking more forward to is being able to use HTML template parts. I think it is that inner part of me that loves the simplicity of it. I love knowing that it does have a low barrier of entry. It is part of that reason I genuinely love WordPress.

That is the biggest reason I love code too.