Social Networks for the life of the world
What’s this problem? WordPress plugins run on a variety of sites running on a variety of server configurations, and a variety of other plugins. It’s common for unexpected configurations to cause trouble for plugin users. Then, users open support threads saying “something went wrong.” The plugin authors then need to ask for configuration information to … Read more
Somebody asked how to set up a WordPress / WooCommerce shop with the Flatsome theme. Understand that this is a web site operations project, not a development project, at least until you get it basically working. For now, ignore any advice to use Bricks, Elementor, Divi or some other site builder. You’ve chosen Flatsome. Get … Read more
I started using UNIX when I loaded the 7th edition nine-track tape onto a PDP-11 in a university lab. The shell — bin/sh or as we put it back then, sh(1) — had a history command that would regurgitate recent command lines. I got in the habit of typing history | grep whatever to find … Read more
You can, but you’re using it in a different way than you would on a full-custom site. Back in the days of Adobe Dreamweaver, people crafted their web sites from HTML using an HTML-aware text editor. It could edit Javascript and CSS too. It was possible, and indeed necessary, to write custom HTML for everything, … Read more
I find myself needing to hack ffmpeg metadata in order to post Gordon Bok’s collection of Kalmyk music. The files ripped by ITunes contain all sorts of metadata. It can be extracted by a command like this and the output looks like this, including a bunch of ITunes-specific metadata items, as well as identifying metadata. … Read more
php’s microtime( true ) function returns a floating point number of seconds since the UNIX epoch. On my computer each call takes about 200ns. The same is true of the time() and hrtime() functions. hrtime() is more modern and gives nanosecond resolution, so use it if possible. It’s available in php 7.3 and beyond. By … Read more
I’ve been working on the SQLIite Object Cache plugin for WordPress. I’m using the APCu User Cache, php’s RAM cache subsystem, to accelerate cache lookups — specifically to support wp_cache_get() and wp_cache_get_multiple() operations. I’ve had to figure out a few things about this php feature. Here are some notes. Its documentation is not as comprehensive … Read more
I’ve been working on the SQLIite Object Cache plugin for WordPress, so I’ve had to figure out a few things about using SQLite itself and php’s SQLite3 extension. Here are some notes. There are various versions of the SQLite software around. If you will run your code on multiple different hosting providers and server configurations, … Read more
WordPress’s core search capability is very simple and very primitive. That can be frustrating. We’re spoiled by Google, Bing, and the other search engines which have had decades to get really good. What makes them good is a lot of information beyond the content of any given site, and thousands of programmer labor years making … Read more
John Blackbourn’s Query Monitor plugin sometimes reports slow queries and duplicate queries. How can you interpret these reports? What are slow and duplicate queries? Slow queries Query Monitor defines slow queries as those that take more than 50 milliseconds (1/20th of a second). Query Monitor shows query times in seconds in the rightmost column of … Read more