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I’m Ben Gillbanks. I make WordPress things at Pro Theme Design, animation things at Brush Ninja, and I co-author a WordPress newsletter called MasterWP. I’m a Dad, a video gamer, and a creative.
Latest Blog Posts
Jubilee Crown Papercraft – and how I made it
To celebrate Queen Elizabeths Platinum Jubilee I designed a little papercraft version of her crown. In fact, I’ve recently gotten into making papercraft toys, both building, and designing them. Most …
Randomness with PHP
When I was making my generative art I needed to generate a lot of random things. The simplest way to do that with PHP is to use the rand() function. …
Creating Generative Art with PHP
These last few weeks I’ve been experimenting with Generative Art, using PHP. You can see the evolution of my latest series on Twitter. Generative Art is creating artworks through programming. …
How to get a list of all WordPress Blocks in the Editor
Early on in the development of the new Gutenberg editor I asked how to get a list of all the blocks available in the new editor, then today Keith Devon …
Take Control of WordPress Plugin and Theme Notifications
Plugin notifications have been a problem in WordPress for a long time now. Last week I saw a conversation on Slack where a developer said he thought they were getting …
New WordPress Plugin: Translate Words
Last week I had a theme customer who wanted to translate some words on their website. The changes they wanted to make were small, and so I wanted a simple …
Creating a Twitter Maze Bot
I recently had the idea to make a Twitter Emoji Maze bot, so I tweeted my idea and it was suggested I write a tutorial about how I made it. …
Fixing Gutenberg Image Floats
Last week Keith Devon asked if anyone knew how to fix Gutenbergs floated image blocks. For some reason the floated image gets wrapped in a containing div. I’m not sure …
How to fix “Invalid default value” MySQL error on WordPress database
Recently I wanted to duplicate a WordPress database table but I couldn’t because I got the error ERROR 1067 (42000): Invalid default value for ‘post_date’. It took a bit of …
Fathom Analytics: A Privacy First Analytics Solution
Over the last few years privacy online has become a big topic. Lots of news stories about companies like Facebook, Amazon, and Google tracking us have raised awareness of privacy …
