~/jrtashjian

JR Tashjian

  • Gravatar Is More Than Just An Avatar

    Personal profile websites are a common sight these days, especially when services like About.me make it so easy for everyone to have one. But did you know Gravatar can do more than just serve your avatar around the websites you frequent? Gravatar provides a personal profile that people can view to learn a little more…

  • Circumstances

    ‎Your present circumstances don’t determine where you can go; they merely determine where you start.

  • Joining Automattic

    I’m very excited to announce that today marks the first day of my employment as a Code Wrangler at Automattic! Automattic is the company behind WordPress.com and other various awesome products. I’ve been using WordPress for some time now and am so grateful to finally be a part of the team. My dream job! I’m…

  • Procrastination

    Procrastination is what happens when you temporarily forget who you are, what you should pay attention to and what your options are for doing something about it. – Merlin Mann

  • The minimalists distraction

    The removal of distraction can very quickly become its own distraction – Merlin Mann

  • Utilize Grep and Vim

    I was working on a client’s huge website for the past couple weeks that required searching many files for instances of a string. My workflow began running grep in the entire directory. The command outputs the path to file and the line number the phrase was found on. I would then open the file in…

  • Postmark API Wrapper for CodeIgniter

    Notice: This project is no longer maintained. I’ve been using Postmark and it’s API for quite a while. If you’re still sending out emails through PHP’s mail() function, you need to check out Postmark! With Postmark you can off-load those transactional emails and not have to worry about it yourself. While there is a Postmark API…

  • Idea Notebook

    Like most developers, I have ideas. Some of those ideas are built, some are still bouncing around in my head and that is a productivity killer for me. Constantly having new ideas and constantly thinking about old ideas is distracting. Not only is it distracting, it makes me feel uninspired. So what did I do?…

  • CodeIgniter Form with Text CAPTCHA

    “A CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart) is a program that protects websites against bots by generating and grading tests that humans can pass but current computer programs cannot.” captcha.net The current CAPTCHA system I started using is Text CAPTCHA. The Text CAPTCHA web service generates text-based CAPTCHAs which…

  • Turn on Error Reporting

    It’s PHP 101, yet so many developers fail to remember it. Always enable the display of errors on your development server, disable them on the live server. Showing all errors will help you find those stubborn programming mistakes quickly. Set these options in your php.ini file.

  • Modular Sidebar in WordPress

    Like all good developers, I go back and look at past code to see what I could have improved and how I can apply the new knowledge to a current project.Both of the projects in question had sidebars with sections that are shared throughout the site. However, not all sections are being displayed at once.…

  • CodeIgniter’s alternator() function


    It’s surprising to me how often I find little functions for tedious tasks, that CodeIgniter already has built in. One of these functions is the alternator() function in the String Helper.

  • Image Thumbnail Creation & Caching With CodeIgniter

    How you handle the saving and display of images is very important while planning your web app. Questions you would ask yourself include: How should images be stored? What will the standard naming conventions be? How will thumbnails be created? In this article, I will be focusing on how I decided the way thumbnails would…

  • Framework of Choice: CodeIgniter

    As a developer, I am always looking for ways to increase the quality of my work and the speed at which I complete a project. One of the ways I do this is by utilizing a framework. The framework I choose is CodeIgniter.

  • WordPress ‘Fetch Feed’ Plugin

    ‘Fetch Feed’ is a RSS retrieval and caching plugin for WordPress. You can use it to parse any RSS feed for displaying on your site. I created it while developing this new theme and thought other users would find it useful. I used it for the Delicious Bookmarks list on the sidebar and for the…

  • Site Launched!

    Hey everyone! My name is JR Tashjian and I am a Web Developer living and working in New York. I started this blog because I wanted to write about what I do and what I learn as well as educate any readers wanting to learn more about Web Development. I will be focusing on the…