Author: DJ Billings
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My Continuing Evolution in WordPress
This year — 2023 — marks the 20th anniversary of WordPress. It’s been around for so long that it’s hard to imagine when it wasn’t part of my daily life, yet it’s still not old enough to drink. When I first dipped my toe into WordPress waters, I was a freelance illustrator and animator. It…
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New Year: What’s the Big Whoop?
Last day of the year. Duh. Why do we make this so significant in our lives? In a practical sense, nothing really changes from the 31st to the 1st. It’s all in our heads, we make it up. Another Saturday to Sunday. Big whoop, right? But it is significant. Moving from one year into the…
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Creating My First WordPress Plugin
I haven’t finished my Personal Browser Start Page project, yet here I am posting about creating a WordPress plugin. I will get back to that browser project, but I’m still learning some JavaScript that will help me make it super duper. In the meantime, I decided to start a new project that I’ve been meaning…
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It’s Okay to Hate Mastodon
“I don’t get Mastodon.” “It’s just another version of twitter, but run by leftists.” “I don’t want to have to learn how to build a server just to talk to my friends.” “The main drawback is that it’s boring! Otherwise it’s a functional twitter clone.” These are some of the comments I’ve been seeing on…
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Building a Personal Browser Start Page
If you’re like me, you have your web browser open most of the time while you’re working. Maybe you have a few tabs open, maybe you have over forty — yup, I heard someone say they had that many open at once. My Virgo heart almost went into spasms. I always tend to have a…
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Surveiled
I took my regular walk in my neighborhood this morning. It was Sunday, already hot at 10:00 am, and super quiet. No one was around except for the odd car driving by. Suddenly, I heard a cheery, female voice. “Hi!” it said. I looked around, but didn’t see anyone. “You are being recorded,” said the…
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Bash Script for Quick and Easy File Transfer via SSH
In my last post, I covered using the command line to transfer music files to my Raspberry Pi media server. This time I want to share some bash scripts I wrote to make it even easier. Automated login It gets old typing ssh dj@192.168.4.59 and then entering my password every time I want to log…
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Charge!
I was just thinking about all the things I charge around my house: These things use very little electricity to stay charged. Living in Southern California, it seems crazy that we don’t have solar panels on our roof. Since we don’t own the house, it doesn’t make sense to pay for them. When we do…
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Helping but not helping
Our yard is a mess. Okay, it’s mostly fine but we have a lot of weeds, and the grass — where it exists — is dry and crackly. I’m okay with this for the most part because we live in super dry Southern California and it turns out that the natural landscape is not a…
