Exploring Modern
WordPress Development

Hi, I’m Brian!

I’m helping WordPress developers and agencies make the transition into the new era of the WordPress Block Editor.

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✏️ All the Latest Everything

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    How To Be Wrong

    This morning one of my daughters was wrong. Shocking, I know, but it happens from time to time. Our girls have been learning some simple ASL (American Sign Language) through YouTube videos. Our four-year-old, Maeve, who can sing her ABCs but not identify most of the letters yet, has made it from A to C…

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    Roosevelt on Parenting

    From Morris’s Roosevelt biography, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, came this quote: …the highest idea of the family is attainable only where the father and mother stand to each other as lovers and friends. In these homes the children are bound to the father and mother by ties of love, respect, and obedience, which are…

  • Quidditch as Self-Directed Sports Education

    My daughter, who currently goes by the name Hermione Granger, has brought Harry Potter fandom to a fever pitch in our house. While reading Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban to her, I was struck by how foreign many of the underlying concepts of quidditch at Hogwarts felt to me. If you haven’t engaged…

  • On Watching Our Daughter Teach Herself to Read

    One of the hardest mental hurdles in self-directed education is the idea that you don’t sit down with the purpose of teaching your kids to read– not unless they explicitly ask for it. You don’t require daily reading lessons, and you never ask the question, “Is my child reading at grade level yet?” Of course…

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    How Many Podcasts Do We Need?

    The ongoing joke starting somewhere around 2018 is that everyone has a podcast. With the move towards ‘shelter-in-place’ rules the past few weeks, that maxim has only proven more true with more friends and relatives grabbing a microphone to unload their point of view. My cynicism has been grappling with how to feel about this,…

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    Finding Yourself vs Creating Yourself

    There’s a moment in Scorcese’s Bob Dylan docu-fantasy for Netflix, Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story, where Bob Dylan is asked about the idea of “finding yourself”. His answer, excerpted below, is probably the most insightful moment of the film, and if the film were an essay, would stand as its thesis statement. Life…

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    How to send a support request to your developer

    Whenever you see issues that look out of date from what you expect the website to look like, the first step is to make sure you’re actually seeing the most recent version of the webpage. Sometimes our browser loads portions of the website from a local ‘cache’ or locally stored version. Make sure you’re getting…

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    How Much is Enough?

    How many people’s kids should I keep track of? Should I know all their names and ages? What if we’re related, does that change things? Nieces and nephews, how important are they? Are second cousins a real thing? Should I know what grade every one is in? Should I watch what my own kids did…

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    Role Play

    We’re outside in a queue, my family and I, about twenty people ahead of us, along an ancient rod-iron fence protecting one of those perfectly manicured Disneyland garden beds. Behind us come the occasional screams from the Matterhorn, a perfunctory sound that’s been added to my memory after the fact, like a laugh track on…

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    Finding the Best vs Making the Best of It

    It’s a typical scene, a husband and wife trying to choose a restaurant for dinner. I don’t remember what it was like before the smartphone. I assume my wife and I would’ve gone out with spears and stalked the nearest wooly mammoth. I can’t remember. These days it’s a little more exhausting. The paradox of…