I have started using JetBrain’s PHPStorm editor at work on a Macintosh and one of the things that has irked me is that some of the standard Macintosh keyboard shortcuts don’t work out of the box. For example, if you’re a seasoned Macintosh user, you are most likely used to using ⌘↑ to go to the […]
Author: Scott Tirrell
Troubleshooting the White Screen of Death in WordPress
One question that I see asked a lot in the WordPress Support Forums is what to do when their website simply displays a white screen. This most likely represents a PHP fatal error that stops the server from generating the HTML for the browser to display. How to Find the Problem When PHP has a […]
Setting up Mac navigation shortcuts in iTerm 2
If you’re a Macintosh user, it is probably second nature to use ⌥← to go back one word and ⌥→ to forward a word. Similarly, ⌘← will bring you to the beginning of a line while ⌘→ will jump you to the end. However, by default, iTerm 2, a great replacement for macOS’s included Terminal application, is not […]
Searching your shell command history
Recently I was working with a colleague through Zoom and sharing my screen. As he watched me furiously tapping my up arrow key like I was playing a Mario Party mini game to cycle through my history of Unix commands, he gave me a great tip. To search through the history of previous commands you […]
AppleScript for playing Rifftrax
Anyone that knows me, knows that I am a huge fan of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and, an off-shoot of that, Rifftrax. One of the great things about Rifftrax is that they sell some MP3-only commentaries. Since they don’t need to license the movie, they can target summer blockbusters like Star Wars: Rogue One, Twilight, […]
Tab Modifier Plus Chrome Extension
As a web developer, I often find myself with local, staging, and live versions of the same website. Obviously, one can tell which environment one they are on by viewing the address in the browser bar. I find it handy to have an additional visual cue, though, to make it even clearer. I have found a […]
Dynamically Overriding a Page’s Template
It is easy to override the template for a post or page in WordPress in a few ways. For example, the naming of page template files can be used to override a single page’s template: page-{id}.php page-{slug}.php Or, a page template can be chosen in the Page Attributes section when editing a page: This works great […]
A Couple Quick Mac Tips
Just a couple of quick Mac tips. First, many programs support using Command-<number> to choose that tab in the program. Some programs are explicit about it and might show the shortcut, like iTerm 2, but this will work in all major browsers I have tried as well as Sublime Text. Also, most times when you […]
Quick Macintosh Tips
It is sometimes hard to explain to people why I enjoy working on a Macintosh. It isn’t because they are shinier or I have fallen prey to the “reality distortion field.” Rather, there are a lot of nice tweaks, that are sometimes not so obvious, that make working with the Macintosh such a nice experience. […]
Hiding the categories of a post when it is “uncategorized”
If you’ve ever had some posts on your WordPress blog, you will have noticed that the “Uncategorized” category is displayed with a link to an archive of uncategorized posts. The easiest way to solve this, of course, is to categorize every blog post. But, if you don’t want to for some reason, you can use […]