Tierra Lab
WPDB Profiling 1.1 Released
An all new version of Tierra’s WPDB Profiling Plugin for Wordpress has been released. The plugin, which we released January of 2009 displays all of the db queries at the very footer of the page showing any slow and potentially hazardous queries which can bring your db to a halt. The [...]
[Read More]PHP Tip: Inline StdClass Object Creation
One of my pet peeves is that PHP does not have syntax to support inline StdClass object creation. This tip shows you how.
[Read More]MySQL Snippet: Pick a Daily Featured Item Automatically
Here is how to add a featured item on your website that changes automatically each day. For this example let’s assume you have an e-commerce site with a MySQL table called “products” that has a column called stock_count which contains the count of each product in stock. We want to feature products in stock, changing daily and also changing automatically if during the day the product goes out of stock.
[Read More]Code Snippet: Preprocessing Moveable Type import files for Wordpress
We’ve moved a couple of clients from older Moveable Type installations to Wordpress and each time Wordpress doesn’t handle the text paragraph formating from the Moveable Type import file. Here is a quick script we created to convert the BODY and EXTENDED BODY sections of the Moveable Type import file to HTML paragraph formatting.
[Read More]Sorry, you missed me!
I’m sitting at home today, waiting for the FedEx guy. This is a common story for me lately. I ordered a new iMac last week, and although the one-unit iMac appealed to my need for simplicity and fewer objects, it has arrived so far in three boxes, on two different days, through two different parcel carriers and three different shipping methods.
[Read More]Processing: Merging code and design
Last week the local software developers group that I am a member of hosted a talk by Ben Fry, the co-creator of Processing. Ben holds a doctorate from the MIT Media Lab where he was a part of the Aesthetics + Computation Group. ACG’s purpose is to “…work toward the design of advanced system architectures and thought processes to enable the creation of (as yet) unimaginable forms and spaces”. In other words, very cool stuff.
[Read More]iCook therefore iPhone
One of the perks to living a double life (one as Tierra’s office manager, the other as an aspiring pastry chef), is that you get to see important aspects of one from the perspective of the other. Case in point: the iphone. We make apps, talk apps, make up apps and trade apps at work and help guide our clients in the process of creating their own iPhone apps. Tierra is well versed on what’s up in the app world.But I never expected to find the iPhone to be a must have tool in kitchens all over New York City…
[Read More]Continuous PHP Profiling
Donald Knuth, the demi-god of computer science, famously once said “We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil.” Though often quoted it is easy to misunderstand what Knuth was saying – its not that you should ignore performance until the project is complete, tacking on an “optimize code” task at the end, rather it’s that your design should not be complicated by performance considerations from the start.
[Read More]Our Favorite WordPress Plugins
With all of the WordPress deployments we have developed for our various clients, we’ve seen a recurring trend with the plug-ins we tend to use. While we do develop our own custom plug-ins at times, we also rely heavily on the global WordPress community and the free offerings from several talented developers. Below are some of the WP plug-ins we’ve not been able to live without.
[Read More]Copyright © 2010 Tierra Innovation, Inc.
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