Bug Zappers and Thoreau

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Enjoying the stale air and torturous chairs of modern air travel is only slightly compensated by the sociological joys of studying the in-flight magazine. My first observation as I skip the vacuous article about three perfect days in some predictable destination is that there are a lot of ads focused on men’s hair. At the […]

Changing WordPress Permalinks from Date-Based to Postname Only

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Are you tired of having dates in WordPress permalinks? I’ve been working on two sites lately where events tend to come back around every year. But if the URL has a date in it, that’s confusing to the visitor and will hurt click-through in Google. In both cases, we wanted to switch to a simple […]

Multi-Dimensional and Associative Arrays in Shopify Liquid

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I know. You’re here because you’re sure you’re missing something. You can’t figure out how to create multi-dimensional and associative arrays in Shopify. Sadly, you’re not missing something. In fact, while you can access multi-dimensional arrays just fine, you can’t assign values to them. Similarly you can access objects with named members that have values […]

Syntax Highlighting for Liquid

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I wanted to publish a blog post today about using Shopify menus to drive hierarchical breadcrumbs. Then I realized that, as near as I can tell, there is nobody who has a syntax highlighter for Liquid, the templating language that Shopify uses. So I created one. This is an pre-pre-alpha experimental plugin, but it’s working […]

Shopify Breadcrumbs based on Menu Structure

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Shopify breadcrumbs can be hard because there’s no way to organize them by default and Shopify has no way to establish a parent-child relationship between collections. But you can use your menu structure to create just such a relationship to build intelligent breadcrumbs. Here’s how!

Going Solar without Rooftop Panels (Renters Too!)

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In the wake of Donald Trump’s election, I am trying to convince at least ten friends to sign up for 100% renewable electricity if it’s available from their local utility. PG&E Solar Choice is the only option in my area. If you’re in the Bay Area, you often have a better option (links below). I […]

Streak, Zapier and Automating Tasks for Our Vacation Rental

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We struggled for a long time to find a system for managing our vacation rental that did not involve pain and suffering. By combining Streak, Zapier and Google Apps, we finally found something that works for us much better than Quickbooks or other systems. It’s not for everyone, but it might be for you.

Why I Quit Using Facebook and Pocket

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In the last couple of days, I deleted the Pocket app from my phone and deactivated my Facebook account. Pocket was becoming a borderline addiction — I’ve always been an avid article reader and Pocket was a major enabler. It was really getting in the way of my New Year’s resolution to read fewer articles […]