This section is for little bits and pieces we'd just like to share with you, including plugins, tutorials, and other news. We could just call it a blog but we're not a huge fan of that word.


jQuery carousel plugin

by Dock Street Media
I've shared another jQuery plugin on GitHub: the infinite-scrolling carousel for images and text. Similar to the accordion plugin, I kept it simple as more of a "teaching" plugin for those who want to work on their jQuery chops while digging into my simple code.
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jQuery accordion plugin

by Dock Street Media
After years of creating my own jQuery plugins for websites I've worked on, I'm finally getting around to setting them up as public repositories on GitHub.
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Password generator

by Dock Street Media
I became tired of using a password generator written by someone else, so I created my own. It is written from scratch using vanilla JavaScript and some simple HTML and CSS.
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Tutorial: Basics of using Git and GitHub

by Dock Street Media
Version control systems in general are good. They're good for keeping a long history of working revisions of a project or automatically merging code between multiple developers. This is not one of those Git vs SVN vs Mercurial comparisons, since I like Git and SVN and use both. For my personal projects, however, I prefer to use Git and GitHub.
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Super basic WordPress theme

by Dock Street Media
Here is a super basic theme to use as a starting point for development of fancier WordPress themes: Download the MikeBasic theme (ZIP) I know it's not perfect. It's mostly for me since I do so much WordPress theming and I was getting tired of stripping down other themes to create new ones.
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Tutorial: Installation of Magento on Dreamhost

by Dock Street Media
If you have a hosting plan on a Dreamhost shared server and are trying to set up the Magento e-commerce package, you are probably having some problems. Granted, Dreamhost shared servers have some limitations, but that is not a reason to give up completely. Installing Magento on Dreamhost is not only possible, but actually pretty simple using the command line.
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Overview of an open-source web development environment

by Dock Street Media
Thought I'd start this whole news off with a little peek behind the curtain of my work environment. I'll try my best not to sound like a typical computer guy and explain things in plain terms. It always frustrated me that other tech people seem to assume that because you read this, you know the difference between "server-side" and "client-side."
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Tutorial: Developing WordPress Themes Locally with XAMPP

by Dock Street Media
As you can probably tell by now, I am a fan of WordPress. It’s easy to install and style and supported by a great community of developers. It has come a long way from being used strictly as a vanilla blogging platform to become one of the most intuitive, feature-filled open-source content management systems (CMS) on the web.
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MikeGen theme

by Dock Street Media
Here is my first publicly-available WordPress theme – the MikeGen theme. The "Gen" is short for generic because I was looking to build a cleaned-up, streamlined base theme that I could use as a starting point for more complicated, flashier themes. It is a simple, two-column, fixed-width, right-sidebar theme meant for basic blogging.
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Tutorial: jQuery show/hide basics

by Dock Street Media
JavaScript has been used for quite a long time to make websites come alive without having to jump from page to page. It is a client-side language, which means it loads in your browser when your page loads, but then is able to do things without refreshing the page in the user’s browser (the "client’s side").
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Alternative cron job backups in Dreamhost

by Dock Street Media
I wrote about Dreamhost Cron Job backups using shell in a previous post. If you ran into an error because of the size of the site GZIP archives, then the alternative system below may be better for you. It may also work better for you if you do not want to send your site files in an email attachment, which is less secure than secure FTP.
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Automatic site backups using cron jobs in Dreamhost

by Dock Street Media
Back up your files. It's said about a million more times than it's heard. Too often we realize we should have backed everything up right after it is too late – when the computer crashes and we lose everything. Websites are no different.
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