Jack Harner is a Freelance Web Developer & E-Commerce Consultant based in Denver, Colorado. Shopify, BigCommerce, WordPress Dev & More.
For my first dip into the AT Protocol, I decided I would try my hand at setting up a Feed. If you're unaware the AT Protocol is a decentralized framework for social media. In short, instead of the Tech Giants up on their flying mansions deciding what…
Here's how to get VS Code to automatically open a couple terminals in your different workspace folders when you first open VS Code. Open your workspace settings with and then type Workspace Settings and select It should look something like this…
Getting Started with Git: Installing and Cloning Repositories from GitHub This guide will help you get Git installed on your computer, clone your first repo from GitHub, and switch branches. Whether you're brand new to Git or need a quick refresher…
When building or modifying BigCommerce's Open Source checkout-js, the only way the docs claim you can access the locally running version of your custom checkout is by changing the Checkout Script URL setting directly on the site settings. This breaks…
CSS Animations are an easy, lightweight way to add a little motion and excitement to a page. You definitely don't want to overdo it, though. One of the most frustrating things as a user is when you go to click on something, it moves, and you miss…
If you want to retrieve a WordPress page by its title you used to be able to do that with a nifty function called . Well now WordPress has deprecated that specific function and you'll get a warning in your site's logs if you try to use it. I'm going…
If you use GitHub actions to build and deploy (CI/CD) a project, you can schedule those actions to automatically run on a specific time interval using cron. This is sweet if you're building a pseudo-static site with data that doesn't change all the…
What IS Ghost Coding? Ghost coding, at it's simplest, is when you do programming work for someone else, and they're paying you to get to pass that work off as their own. Similar to "ghost writing", the end customer should never know you've done work…
I have a client whose website needs to send a few emails every now and then. I was curious who had the best free tier for sending transactional emails since they most likely shouldn't be breaking any free tier limits. Here are the results of my…
SmartBlocks in Roam Research I recently learned about SmartBlocks in Roam Research (my note/to-do tool of choice). SmartBlocks allow you to create dynamic templates and actions. I've only really begun to scratch the surface of what's possible but I…
I'm currently writing to you from a beautiful AirBnB in Bruges, Belgium, halfway through a birthday trip around Europe with my partner. Freelancing never really stops and I know I couldn't afford to take two+ weeks off. Thankfully being a freelance…
Did you know you can fetch Customer data on the frontend in a custom BigCommerce Widget? If you didn't, well it's your lucky day because today I'm going to show you how. Schema Setup This tutorial is going to assume you are using Bigcommerce's Widget…
Sometimes when you're working with graphic design you end up working on a piece that's meant to be displayed on a non-white background, like a logo or web icon. Unfortunately, there isn't really a way to set the background color of an artboard in…
WordPress Development relies on either Themes or Plugins for WordPress. Today, I'm going to walk you through the base files you need for any WordPress Theme. A few of these files you absolutely need for WordPress to even consider your collection of…
One of the toughest parts about being a freelancer is the possibility that you'll have to chase down every single paycheck you ever earn. However, there are some steps you can take ahead of time to prevent you from having to chase too hard. Keep in…
Becoming a Full Time Freelancer without a Computer Science Degree 😉 I was asked to interview on the No CS Degree blog. The blog focuses on people working in tech and web development that never received a computer science degree. It's a testament to…
Have you ever had to stay up till midnight to flip over to a new BigCommerce theme with banners and content for a big sale (Black Friday, for example)? It's super annoying having to time the theme launch and there's no way to really automate that…
Customizing the WordPress Login Page The default WordPress Login page is so boring. A simple yet effective change you can do when building a client site on WordPress is update the login page with the company logo and brand colors. It's a nice touch…
Turn On The Custom Admin Menu Hook The hook is a simple hook that just tells WordPress you want to display the Admin menu in a custom order. You filter it with and can just use the built-in function to (you can probably guess) return true to the…
Shopify sections make it super easy to add customizable settings that your clients can control with a wonderful user-friendly UI. One of the many settings types available to Shopify Sections is the Color Picker: One slightly annoying part about the…
SetAttributes() Doesn't Automatically Convert Types I was using a SelectControl to set a Category ID for a specific Gutenberg block I was building. Turns out the function doesn't automatically convert types. The SelectControl returns the value as a…
Shopify is the most customizable e-commerce platform, while still being super user friendly out of the box. Like yes, hypothetically you can build literally anything you wanted if you built it from scratch, but who's got the time for that?! (Let…
As of writing, I've been freelancing fulltime for just over 200 days now (Woo 🎉) and I wanted to share with y'all what I've been doing to get new clients in 2021 and how I plan to adjust going into 2022. I'm making no guarantee that these tactics…
Somehow I continuously run into File Permissions Issues while working with WordPress, so this is primarily just a reference for myself. For whatever reason, things can get pretty hectic, and you've probably ran into a similar issue if you've ever…
Now that June is in the books and things have pretty much settled, I'm getting into my new routine and I'm LOVING it. I basically just wake up whenever, take my time enjoying my coffee, and then settle into work when it feels right. Not having to…
It Finally Happened: The End Of An Era My last official day at my 9-5 was April 30th. After working there for almost 5 years, it was definitely a bittersweet ending. My bosses had known about my exit for the better part of 6 weeks, and that time…
Don't be a T-Shaped Developer Be a T H I C C Developer Instead! What's A T-Shaped Developer? The idea of a T-Shaped Dev has been around since the early 2010s, and it evolved from the concept of an I-Shaped Dev. The Letters Jack, WHAT DO THEY MEAN…
Have you ever had a JavaScript object that you needed to extract a bunch of different values out of? Today I'd like to introduce you to your new best friend: ES6 Destructuring. ES6 brings with it a bunch of nifty new ways to do things with JavaScript…
Do you want to include the Subscriber Count from your ConvertKit Newsletter on your Gatsby.js Site? If that oddly specific scenario applies to you then read on, and I'll show you just how to do it. If not, consider checking out ConvertKit anyway…
MkDocs is a "fast, simple and downright gorgeous" static site generator for turning a collection of Markdown files into a documentation site. Today, I'm going to walk you through how to get MkDocs setup (which isn't hard). What's The Need? I stumbled…
Post Updated November 21st, 2022 to work with Stencil-CLI >5.x Back in November 2019, GitHub released GitHub Actions. An "API for cause and effect" they called it. Basically, GitHub Actions allow you to program things to happen when other things…
I read this great article from @swizec about how he made almost $400k over 5 years on the side through books, courses and other digital media sales. His path to success sparked my curiosity to see if I could do it to. I've got several ideas for…
I'm Lazy. BUT I'm the good kind of lazy that works really hard to do as little actual work as possible. If I have to do anything more than twice, I'm going to think about automating it. From scripts to download & process product photos, to hours…
At Shoolu, we take advantage of Custom Fields on products in BigCommerce all the time. Our inventory software runs some rules against the product data and sets various fields as various values we use to enhance the product pages across the site. The…
After wanting one for some time, I finally caved and bought a Raspberry Pi. I got the Pi 4 Model B, the latest and greatest. It boasts the ability to replace your desktop computer, with two micro-HDMI outs as well as on-board wi-fi and 4 USBs. Seeing…
Day 331 : Sunday, March 14th 2021 Wow. It's been a while. Just recently got my like 5th wind on this project and got a lot done in the last couple weeks. Lots has happened. Actually "Lots has happened" is an understatement. I fixed whatever login…
My first Unsplash photo was posted on August 18, 2016. In that time I've accumulated almost 3 Million Views, and over 12,000 downloads across 30+ photos. This Is Why I Post On Unsplash For someone with such a small following where most of my…
NPM (Node Package Manager) and Yarn are both JavaScript based package managers for ease of installing 3rd Party Tools & Libraries into your modern web development workflow. They revolutionized the way people shared code. Instead of having to…
There are several ways to take a screenshot in Firefox. Right Click Context Menu First up you want to Right Click anywhere on the page and select "Take a Screenshot". This will pop up Firefox's built in screenshot tool. It allows you to select…
JackHarner.com is built with Gatsby, a framework based on React that makes blazing fast websites. Gatsby Logo I have my Blog and Portfolio content setup as a couple of directories with subdirectories for the individual posts. Like so: Each of the…
Read My Diary 😉 I was asked to guest post on the BigCommerce Developer blog as part of their Developer Diaries series. The series looks at the general day to day of different people working in the e-commerce/BigCommerce space. I provided a look at…
DigitalOcean is a cloud infrastructure company based in New York City. They have blazing fast data centers all over the world and are my personal favorite hosting provider. I point all of my clients there and anytime I need a server or any kind of…
So, you want to make some changes to an Open Source Repo? Good for you. That's the beauty of Open Source, even just fixing typos in the documentation makes a difference. Today I'm going to walk you through keeping your copy of a repo up to date with…
Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash In Chrome and Firefox (>31) you can add CSS styles to your console.log() messages. It's fairly simple and straightforward. All you need to do is include a %c string before your log message and then pass your…
BigCommerce for WordPress (BC4WP) allows you to combine the power of the BigCommerce back-end with the customization of WordPress on the front-end for a truly unique E-Commerce experience. One thing that seems missing out of their integration is a…
Sometimes you need to be exact in your designs. I'm definitely a little bit of a perfectionist when it comes to things like that. Maybe you need to align the rotation of something to the edge of another object. You could just eyeball it, but that's…
You probably found this post because you're trying to crop images in WordPress' Media Library Image Editor. The button's greyed out right from the start. Oh No! How Do I Crop images with WordPress? You just have to click and drag on the image, the…
Allowing SVG Files in WordPress so you can upload them through the Media panel is surprisingly simple. This allows you to harness the power and speed benefits of SVG Files as opposed to Raster Images. Either add the following snippet to your theme's…
Do you frequently update WordPress themes? It's kind of a pain in the ass, right? Typically has to be done manually through FTP or uploading a new zip through the backend. Well, today I'm going to show you how to update your site with just: Sounds…
I wrote a python script for Shoolu.com to use the BigCommerce API to pull the latest added products and generate an XML RSS file. BigCommerce did have the functionality to automatically generate these RSS feeds but they have moonlighted support and…