In short, I’m still breathing and I’m focused on living a life. I still work in web software development and I still mostly love it. But my hobbies and my friends are where I put my after-hours energy in recent years. Some stuff I’ve been doing:

• I have a solo band, Plague Society. I hope to record and release more music soon, but for now, there’s a single out which I’m pretty proud of.
• I make short tracks on my Youtube channel, performed on my collection of compact hardware synthesizers.
• I enjoy photography, and recently I’ve been exploring film photography again after a 20 year hiatus. I occasionally post photo galleries on a separate personal site. I also share some of my photography and slice-of-life images on Instagram.
• For a while I was DJing again, and there are a few mixes on Mixcloud. I’m back in DJ retirement, but I’ve been asked by seven or eight people to do events with them in the last few months, so I might appear on a stage somewhere in the Northeast with my dusty old MP3s at some point in the future.

Mostly I’m just hanging out with my partner, taking care of my cats, and getting together with friends when I can get away to visit them. There have been some ups and downs, but life is pretty good.

The post What am I up to? appeared first on ScottNellé.com.

/**
 * Disable revisions for all post types.
 */
function my_disable_post_revisions() {
	foreach ( get_post_types() as $post_type ) {
		remove_post_type_support( $post_type, 'revisions' );
	}
}
add_action( 'init', 'my_disable_post_revisions', 999 );

If you’d like to disable post revisions for only specific set of built-in or custom post types instead of targeting all types, you can do that with an array:

/**
 * Disable revisions for all post types.
 */
function my_disable_post_revisions() {
	$types = array( 'post', 'my-custom-type' );
	foreach ( $types as $post_type ) {
		remove_post_type_support( $post_type, 'revisions' );
	}
}
add_action( 'init', 'my_disable_post_revisions', 999 );

The high priority, 999, means it’s almost certain to execute after any other code which adds revision support.

The ability to disable revisions is particularly helpful when moving a site from another system to WordPress. Frequent post editing and other operations may result in a large number of revisions saved in the database.

If you want to start saving revisions again, simply remove this code from your theme or plugin.

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Unfortunately for you, the writer, that data is no longer easily available in Google Analytics. Google began obscuring search terms from referrer data because they wanted to protect their user’s privacy. Or, if you’re cynical, the data was too valuable to give away for free. (it’s totally available if you set up another product, Google Search Console.) All of the other major search engines followed suit, making it more challenging to mine this search data to improve your site.

Using your own site search

But activities on your own site are your own business, and Google Analytics’ Site Search makes it pretty easy for you to track what people are searching for on your site. Utilizing data about what people are searching for on your site, you can identify areas of strong interest where you aren’t writing enough, or haven’t written at all. And if you’ve set up Site Search tracking and aren’t seeing much search traffic, that may also be instructive. You might consider updating your site to make search a more prominent feature.

The post Mine your site search data for content ideas appeared first on ScottNellé.com.

Set it up

To configure site search tracking for a WordPress site:

1. Log in to Google Analytics and click on Admin.
2. Select the appropriate Account, Property, and View for your site at the head of their respective columns in the Admin interface.
3. In the View column, select View Settings.
4. Enable the Site Search Tracking option with the toggle switch.
5. Set the Site Search Parameter field to “s” which is the parameter WordPress uses for search terms.
6. Optionally, check “Strip query parameters out of URL.” This will make all searches show up in analytics with the same URL (“/?s=Search Term&submit=Search” by default,) making it easier to track total search volume in your other reporting views.
7. Click Save to finish!

Now search data will be parsed out into the Site Search interface for all future traffic.

Advanced use

If you have a custom search form which filters using default or custom taxonomies, you can get further insight into visitors’ search habits on your site using Site Search Categories. In the same interface, enable Site Search Categories and enter a comma separated list of any taxonomy identifiers which may appear in your search queries. These identifiers will be the query_var for the taxonomy. For a custom taxonomy this is likely the taxonomy name, unless you’ve specifically replaced it. For tags and Categories it will be “tag” and “category_name” respectively. Again, you can optionally check “Strip category parameters out of URL” to keep all of your searches tracking as a single URL.

Now that you’re tracking your search terms, check out Google’s advice for interpreting it. To paraphrase my buddy Gahlord, analytics data is only useful if you’re using it to make decisions.

The post Site search tracking for WordPress with Google Analytics appeared first on ScottNellé.com.

In the WordPress admin taxonomy edit screen, Tags and any hierarchical custom taxonomies include a tag cloud of “Popular Items” in the left column above the Add Term form. I find this feature useless in most cases, particularly on a large site that may have hundreds of terms in a taxonomy.

Strangely, the official way to disable this tag cloud is to set the popular_items label to null when registering your taxonomy. Indeed, this is the only place the label appears to be used at all. If you’ve registered your own taxonomies and you can override that label in your code, go ahead and do that to clear up the problem. If you have taxonomies registered by a plugin or another method that is outside of your direct control, you can remove it by filtering the taxonomy arguments to unset the label. Here’s how:

/**
 * Remove tag cloud from taxonomy edit screen.
 */
function my_remove_popular_term_cloud( $args ) {
	$args['labels']['popular_items'] = null;
	return $args;
}
add_filter( 'register_taxonomy_args', 'my_remove_popular_term_cloud' );

If you want to target specific taxonomies, you can check which taxonomy you’re working with by passing additional parameters to the filter:

/**
 * Remove tag cloud from taxonomy edit screen.
 */
function my_remove_popular_term_cloud( $args, $taxonomy ) {
	if ( 'post_tag' === $taxonomy ) {
		$args['labels']['popular_items'] = null;
	}
	return $args;
};
add_filter( 'register_taxonomy_args', 'my_remove_popular_term_cloud', 10, 2 );

Now your taxonomy edit screens will be nice and tidy!

The post Remove the tag cloud from the taxonomy edit screen appeared first on ScottNellé.com.

/**
 * Get the top level parent of a given term.
 * @param WP_Term|int The term who's ancestors we'll be tracing.
 * @param string Name of taxonomy to search. Required only if $term is an ID instead of a WP_Term object.
 * @return WP_Term|bool The top level parent of $term. If $term has no parent, return false.
 */
function get_term_progenitor( $term, $tax = 'category' ) {
	if ( is_int( $term ) ) {
		$term = get_term_by( 'id', $term, $tax );
	}

	if ( 0 == $term->parent || ! $term instanceof WP_Term ) {
		return false;
	}

	while ( $term instanceof WP_Term && 0 != $term->parent ) {
		$term = get_term_by( 'id', $term->parent, $term->taxonomy );
	}
	return $term;
}

To use it feed in a term object or a term id and taxonomy combo to get the original ancestor of your term. If your term has no parent, it will return false. This is helpful if you need to apply a class to a whole tree of terms, for example. If your

It’s worth noting that this function will call get_term_by() multiple times, and it is known to create slower database queries. If you have nested your terms more than a few levels it may be worth storing the results of this function in a persistent object cache to speed up performance.

The post Find the top level parent term appeared first on ScottNellé.com.

function my_youtube_player_iframe_api( $html ) {
	if ( false !== strpos( $html, 'youtube' ) ) {
		$html = str_replace( '?feature=oembed', '?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1', $html );
	}
	return $html;
}
add_filter( 'oembed_result', 'my_youtube_player_iframe_api', 10, 1 );

OEmbed results are cached as post meta, so once you’ve modified the output you’ll have to delete previously-cached URLs before the new filter will take effect for existing posts.

Once you’ve done all of that you can configure and use the iframe API to track interactions, manipulate video controls, and do anything else that the API exposes.

The post Enable the YouTube iframe API for embedded videos appeared first on ScottNellé.com.

If you need to load an enqueued script asynchronously in WordPress, or modify the <script> element in any other way, you can use code like the following:

/**
 * Add async attributes to enqueued scripts where needed.
 * The ability to filter script tags was added in WordPress 4.1 for this purpose.
 */
function my_async_scripts( $tag, $handle, $src ) {
    // the handles of the enqueued scripts we want to async
    $async_scripts = array( 'some-script', 'another-script' );

    if ( in_array( $handle, $async_scripts ) ) {
        return '<script type="text/javascript" src="' . $src . '" async="async"></script>' . "\n";
    }

    return $tag;
}
add_filter( 'script_loader_tag', 'my_async_scripts', 10, 3 );

The script_loader_tag filter was added in WordPress 4.1 for specifically this purpose. It is run whenever a script tag is generated by WordPress using the wp_enqueue_script() function. In this example we compare the script $handle against a list of known scripts that we want to load asynchronously.

The post Add async, defer, or other attributes to enqueued WordPress scripts appeared first on ScottNellé.com.

At first I just put a big orange image on the screen, which did the job nicely. However, I found that I often needed to take notes during calls, and bringing up my note taking application brought the ugly light back. So I took a few minutes to cook up a better solution.

Healthy Glow is one of the simplest web apps I can imagine, but it actually serves its purpose beautifully. It’s a big, orange text box that you can type notes into. It uses local storage so that your notes never get sent to the server and never get deleted unless your clear them (or change browsers.) No accounts, no back end, just a simple web page that addresses a very specific problem.

Have a look at a before and after image and I think you’ll agree that this very stupid idea of mine actually makes a significant difference:

Before: Ugly blue light

After: Healthy, warm light

If you spend a lot of time in front of a webcam, please feel free to give Healthy Glow a try. I think everyone involved in your next call will agree that it casts you in a positive light (groan.)

The post New Web App: Healthy Glow for Video Chat appeared first on ScottNellé.com.

Now I’m happy to say I’ll never have to give that answer again, and neither will you! My latest plugin, Custom Related Products for WooCommerce, replaces the default related products functionality in WooCommerce. With the plugin activated, edit any product and click the “Linked Products” tab. In addition to Cross-sells and Upsells, you’ll now have a Related Products box. As long as you’re using a default related products implementation, the plugin will work automatically to show the products you selected in the Related Products list at the bottom of the detail view, no theme updates required.

Get it!

You can download Custom Related Products for WooCommerce from WordPress.org or install it from the Add New Plugins page in your admin starting today. If you have suggestions for changes, you can fork the plugin and submit pull requests with GitHub.

The post New Plugin: Custom Related Products for WooCommerce appeared first on ScottNellé.com.