Self portrait where I'm only visible from the eyes-up and hanging upside down from the top of the frame.

From the Desk of Brian Richards

A collection of thoughts and Ideas from Brian Richards, creator of WPSessions.com

Author: Brian Richards

  • Caring and Keeping for our T1D

    Let’s get right to the point: if you’re reading this, you have some pointed questions about how to care for Teddy and, specifically, managing his type-1 diabetes (T1D). Before we get into that, let me take a minute to ease any concerns you have. For the most part, Teddy’s condition is very easy to manage.…

  • Four Years after our Robbery

    Four Years after our Robbery

    Today marks four years since I was robbed. Someone entered my home, presumably between 12-6am while I and the rest of my family were sleeping, and liberated the premises of my LEGO collection. And nothing more. I wrote a blog post on the day of the theft to catalog some things and hopefully find the…

  • Piecing it back together: one year after our lego theft

    Piecing it back together: one year after our lego theft

    It’s been a year since someone broke into our home, while we were sleeping, and stole only our Lego collection. This continues to be the strangest thing I’ve ever experienced and I hope it forever will be – I don’t know if I could handle anything stranger. Throughout the year we have heard the same…

  • Stolen LEGO: Two weeks later, now with a $2000 reward

    Stolen LEGO: Two weeks later, now with a $2000 reward

    The past two weeks have been a blur. This is, by far, the strangest thing that has happened in my life to date. I sincerely hope it goes down as the strangest thing ever, because I don’t think I’m prepared for anything weirder than this. Here’s a quick high-level summary and you can find more…

  • Help! My entire LEGO collection was stolen!

    Help! My entire LEGO collection was stolen!

    Did you take my entire LEGO collection? Because somebody did. If it wasn’t you, can you help me find the thief? A list of sets, some photos of the collection, and media coverage appear at the very end of this post. Read the follow-up post, with details on a $2000 reward Read the one-year-later epilogue…

  • Conditionally change JetPack Infinite Scroll trigger to “click” or “scroll”

    Earlier today I was trying to change the “type” for JetPack’s Infinite Scroll behavior to use “click” only for the front page. For all other archives I wanted JetPack to use the standard “scroll” type (you know, the namesake for Infinite Scrolling). I think the infinite_scroll_has_footer_widgets filter is the right choice, but is_front_page() isn’t yet…

  • Serve Missing Media from a Production Server via Apache/Nginx

    When working on a website locally, it can become quite tedious to pull down all media from a production environment – particularly if you just need to spot-check one or two key areas. In some cases, the production sites I work with have media folders that are more than 1GB (!!) in size. In fact, it’s not…

  • Becoming a Better Developer: Week 1 Review

    This past week has been absolutely packed with new knowledge. I’ve distilled it as best I can for now. I hope future travellers will benefit from this as much as I have. Getting Started This past week I read the first four chapters of Clean Code and several relevant blog articles: The Case Against Singletons in…

  • Becoming a Better Developer: Week 1 Schedule

    This week marks the beginning of my 16 week “Becoming a Better Developer” course. Starting today I’ll be reading the first four chapters of Clean Code: Clean Code Meaningful Names Functions Comments I’ve looked ahead, and I’m really excited by some of the excerpts I’ve read. I’m particularly enthused by Uncle Bob’s strong emphasis on…

  • Becoming a Better Developer

    As I stated last week, for the next four months I’m putting myself through code school. Objective and Plan In order to do this right, I’ve outlined a 16 week plan that has me reading 5 books and recording what I’m learning. Every Monday I’ll write about the chapters I intend to read and what…