WordPress Archives

WordPress is my favorite Content Management System (CMS). Once in a while it helps me make some extra money. Once in a while it helps me look at the problem from a different perspective. But even when it doesn’t, I still enjoy using it for this (and a few other) websites. And I enjoy interacting with the community. I use this category to share bits and pieces which are WordPress related.

  1. Capsule – developer’s scratch pad

    By Leonid Mamchenkov

    I’ve just learned about Capsule, and I think you should too.

    capsule

     

    It is based off WordPress, and does sound interesting.  But the two best things about it, I think, are that a developer can keep it private, and that a developer can connect his own Capsule to multiple Capsule servers.  That ought to be a killer feature, as the only two arguments that I’ve heard from developers trying to make them blog more were, if only I had a better way of organizing my private code snippets, and if only I could share them privately with project teammates.

    P.S.: I am also a big fan of using P2 theme for WordPress, which works wonders for project teams.  But Capsule seems to be an even better tool for developer kinds.

  2. RSS + IFTTT + Evernote = Backup

    By Leonid Mamchenkov

    This post is just a test.   I’ve created a new personal recipe using IFTTT service, which will pull the RSS feed of this blog, and create a new note in a specific notebook of my Evernote account.  This is not recommended as a backup solution of course (you should do a proper filesystem and database backups), but if it works as good as I imagine, then I can use it for part of my RSS aggregation.  For example, I follow some blogs that I’d like to save most of the posts, but not all, and then search through those.  With a similar recipe, RSS feeds can be pushed into my Evernote account, and I can then just delete those notes that I don’t need.

    Anyways, if you haven’t tried out IFTTT or Evernote, I strongly recommend both.  Those services are magical.

  4. WordPress passwords and brute force →

    From the man himself:

    Here’s what I would recommend: If you still use “admin” as a username on your blog, change it, use a strong password, if you’re on WP.com turn on two-factor authentication, and of course make sure you’re up-to-date on the latest version of WordPress. Do this and you’ll be ahead of 99% of sites out there and probably never have a problem. Most other advice isn’t great — supposedly this botnet has over 90,000 IP addresses, so an IP limiting or login throttling plugin isn’t going to be great (they could try from a different IP a second for 24 hours).

  5. One million views

    By Leonid Mamchenkov

    It’s been a while since I posted any milestones for this blog, so here you go.

    1 million views

     

    Yup, according to WordPress stats, my blog pages have been viewed a 1,000,000 times.  Now, they were probably viewed way more than that in the full version of the history, but the plugin that counts them was only installed in 2007, if I remember correctly.  Also, there used to be a period of time when this blog was served via an external cache, so only a few of the visitors triggered a real page request.

    Still, it’s nice to see the number build up.

    According the graph above, I’m getting significantly fewer visitors in the last year or so.  That’s because I’ve been running between several jobs and side projects, and at some point nearly stopped blogging completely.  But I am back now, so that should go up as well.

  6. WordPress version check

    By Leonid Mamchenkov

    With all the news of brute force attacks against WordPress, I thought I’d at least update the installations running on my servers.  Since there are quite a few instances of WordPress on some of them, I was in need of some automated way to check the installed version, hence – the WordPress version check script.

    I have some really old versions that I wouldn’t update automatically, so that functionality is not in the script yet (hopefully in the future). But as they say, knowing the problem is half of the solution or something like that.

    If you don’t like mine, build your own, using WordPress.org API.

  7. The biggest merge ever

    By Leonid Mamchenkov

    I am having a really proud and exciting moment at work right now.  We’ve just deployed the biggest merge ever.  I can’t really share enough details to provide you with the context (NDA and all), but here is a GitHub screenshot that gives you an idea.

    the biggest merge ever

    If you are not familiar with GitHub and don’t know how to read this, here is a summary:

    • 1,633 individual commits
    • 2,696 modified files
    • 424,292 lines of code added
    • 82 lines of code removed
    • work done by 4 people

    And it all went so smooth, that we even deployed it on Friday, without a single second of downtime.  Awesomeness!

    Update (April 15, 2013): And just when I thought that that was the biggest merge ever, we did one more the next working day.  Have a look!

    the biggest merge ever again

  8. Cool stuff in upcoming WordPress 3.6

    By Leonid Mamchenkov

    WordPress 3.6 is not too far away, with the first beta already released last week.   WordPress VIP blog did a very nice and very visual overview of the changes and new features in the release.  For me personally, these are the highlights: log out notifications, better autosave, and a new look for post formats.

    WordPress logout notification

    Things that I still hope to see one day in WordPress are: some sort of standard for post formats (cross-theme support, mobile app support, etc), and easier way of development and deployment across multiple environments (dev/test/live servers, etc).  Regardless of my pending wishes, WordPress is still an awesome piece of software, which gets even more awesome with each release.

  9. WordPress plugin : Threads

    By Leonid Mamchenkov

    I just came across Alex King’s announcement of his new plugin – Threads:

    I’ve just released an initial beta of Threads, a WordPress plugin I’ve been working on for about a year. The idea is simple: show posts that comprise a single overall story/topic in a timeline. Then link to that timeline from the posts so that your readers have a chance to get more historical context about a post without you having to link back to 20 previous posts.

    This sounds like an excellent idea.  Some of things that I see it being used for are event coverage posts and live blogging.  There are, of course, already plugins for WordPress to  Organize Series of posts, and to do Live Blogging.  But they each have their limitations.   Live blogging posts easily get huge.   And series do have a navigational nightmare about them.  It looks like Threads plugin aims to address those issues.