Today WPEngine launched their new GeoIP service, and I was excited to check it out. After doing a presentation on handling Geolocation in WordPress I know it can be a difficult problem to solve at scale, especially with any kind of caching. The way it works is by having a plugin installed that gives you functions to grab… Read more »
Learning Center
Just because WordPress still supports PHP 5.2 doesn’t mean you have to
WordPress still has a minimum PHP 5.2 requirement, which has many known security issues and reached end-of-life back in 2011. 4 years ago. A lot has changed in PHP and software development in general since then, and while WordPress should perhaps be taking more of a leadership role to push for change, it doesn’t mean we… Read more »
How to change the WordPress permalink structure to remove dates from the URL
If the content you write isn’t date specific (ie. news), it’s a good idea to remove the date from the URL of your WordPress site. This is also good if, like me, you don’t blog on a super regular basis and don’t want people to know the awesome content you wrote is actually a few months… Read more »
How to fix slow sendmail on a Digital Ocean Ubuntu droplet
I recently switched over to Digital Ocean for my main server thanks to Bryan Poetz‘s suggestion, and was running into an issue where mail was sending but slowly. Turns out there were two problems. First, I had named the droplet “main” (since it was, you know, the main server), but this really should be a… Read more »
Introduction to Backbone.js
I recently spoke again at WordCamp Buffalo. I saw a lot of great talks and met some passionate WordPress designers, developers and users I normally wouldn’t have! The talk was an Introduction to Backbone.js and the slides are available here along with an example plugin you can use to get started. TweetShareShare
How to Protect Yourself When Having Custom Software Developed
I was recently brought in to assess a site that was developed. Though it was supposed to have been custom written to fit the needs of the business, it turns out the local company simply purchased a pre-written (originally from 2004) piece of software but tried to pass it off as custom developed by changing… Read more »
HackerNest Construct Hackathon
The HackerNest Construct Hackathon took place a couple weeks back, and myself, Garth Gutenberg, Connie Leung and Tom Pepper competed as Team ISIS. The whole event was super well organized, and we got a chance to play with the soon to be released Kiwi Move. Our idea was to create a cookie aid app where with… Read more »
Geolocation in WordPress
The video from my talk at WordCamp Buffalo 2013, Geolocation in WordPress, has been posted on wordcamp.tv. Was a great event and looking forward to attending more WordCamps in 2014! Slides can be found on SlideShare TweetShareShare
Issues Fetching calendar times from iCloud via CalDAV
Using the ‘root’ server caldav.icloud.com will fetch calendar entries for a particular user, but the results will not always be complete. No errors are raised at all yet the results weren’t correct. After a bit of experimentation it turns out using caldav.icloud.com instead of the user’s “actual” server (p02-caldav.icloud.com in my case) causes random calendar… Read more »
Removing the author from a WordPress feed
One client didn’t want the author’s e-mail address directly visible, and though it was removed from the theme it still appeared in the feed. Fortunately there’s a filter for that: function my_remove_author_from_feed( $author ) { if ( is_feed() ) { $author = ”; } return $author; } add_filter(‘the_author’, ‘my_remove_author_from_feed’);