Philip John

  • The Internet’s Own Boy

    Aaron Swartz was a phenomenal person. Watching The Internet’s Own Boy recently reminded me of that fact. The film is, to me, a fantastic reminder that the internet needs to remain open, that access to public information should always be free and open. Some of my early activism was based on this. I was once involved in…

  • Huel

    Last year I started using Huel. I prefer to eat my own food, I avoid ready meals (although, I have to make exceptions for pie and pizza!) but I find cooking to be incredibly boring. I just have better things to do with my life (like binge-watch Star Trek)! Trying to get a balanced diet also isn’t that easy…

  • 13th

    Shortly after the US Presidential Election and Trump’s victory there, I watched 13th – a documentary about the US Justice system. The film explores the history of incarceration in the US and suggests mass incarceration grew out of slavery and became a huge business profiting from the system’s inherent racism and the slave labour of prisoners. It’s definitely…

  • Late escape your WordPress plugins!

    A little while ago a colleague shared this interesting article from RIPS on the state of WordPress security. It focused on an automated analysis of 44,705 plugins from the WordPress.org plugin directory (almost all of them). They found that 68.4% of those plugins contained cross-site scripting vulnerabilities. That’s a huge number, and a huge number of vulnerable…

  • Blaming tech entrepreneurs for political failings is a form of prejudicial demonisation that helps no-one

    A colleague recently shared this essay by Andrew Russell and Lee Vinsel. It’s main point is that Elon Musk is morally corrupt for pursuing a dream of putting humanity on Mars instead of helping solve social issues like poverty and inequality. Russell and Vinsel suggest that anyone with wealth is morally obligated to engage in selfless humanitarianism.…

  • Nginx: Redirect everything except the home page

    Recently I moved this blog to philipjohn.blog, making philipjohn.me.uk a sort of “homepage” pointing to my various online presences. Previously, my blog was at philipjohn.me.uk so as well as changing the URL (which was made easy by WP-CLI) I need to redirect all philipjohn.me.uk URLs to philipjohn.blog. However, I wanted the root of philipjohn.me.uk to show a…

  • You should blog

    It’s not like I use Twitter anymore, so I’ve only experienced “Tweetstorms” via colleagues sharing stuff through Slack. Still, like Chris, I can’t help feeling that sharing in this way isn’t a great use of Twitter. That said, I’m pretty sure WordPress isn’t really the right tool either. Even though WordPress.com is quick to set up,…

  • Return Data Not HTML

    My colleague Tom has some excellent advice. He suggests that in applications, such as WordPress plugins or themes, you should always return data rather than returning strings of concatenated HTML. Instead the data should be passed to a separate function that will then echo the HTML. Take a look.

  • New York, New York

    New York, New York

    Thanks to how awesome my job is* I recently spent a few days in New York. It was the first time I’d visited New York and although it was a short trip packed full of meetings I got to see some sights 🙂 Highlights included; My first (I think) propeller plane flight. Seeing Untappd used in a…