Automatic Featured Images from Post Title

Jason Bahl on October 30, 2015

As I’ve been starting to post to my blog more often, I’ve struggled with how the design of my site should be. . .I want it to be visually appealing, but I don’t have the time or desire to work on images for all my posts. . .this could be an interesting solution to add more visual appeal with little work.

I’ve yet to check it out, but I’m saving the link here to check out sometime soon.

http://www.wpmayor.com/featured-image-plugin/

EasySearch 2.0

Jason Bahl on October 30, 2015

When I was first tinkering with Meteor, I played around with EasySearch and it seemed to be a great package that was easy to use. I didn’t have much need for it, but the more I work with Meteor, the more I feel like I will be needing a good solution for search, so I plan to check out EasySearch 2.0 and see how it might work with some projects I’m working on. It’s looking sweet.

https://atmospherejs.com/easy/search

Headway annoys me

Jason Bahl on October 29, 2015

I’ve had to help maintain a few blogs that were built on Headway and it’s unbelievably frustrating to work with. I’m sure there’s some great things about it if you spend the time to get to know the ins and outs of it, but it’s pretty annoying to work with.

Today I spent some time migrating a blog away from Headway, and realized it’s even more annoying that I thought. I was trying to move some SEO data (meta descriptions and titles) and hunting down where Headway stores data was frustrating.

Instead of storing the data for posts in ‘wp_post_meta’ or ‘wp_posts’ like one would expect, Headway creates a new option for each post in ‘wp_options’ and stores everything as a searialized array under that option. I’m sure there’s some explanation on why it’s done this way, but it’s frustrating to work with if you’re used to traditional WordPress standards.

Again, I’m sure there are great things about Headway. I know they’re successful and have a strong customer base, but I find it frustrating to work with, and can’t personally recommend using it.