Speeding up WordPress database operations

The information in this post isn’t up to date. This was the original concept paper for the plugin. Please see here for the latest. Rick James and I have cooked up a plugin, Index WP MySQL for Speed, to help optimize the way WordPress uses its MySQL database. It adds indexes to WordPress’s tables in … Read more

Transcoding JPEG optimizer from Mozilla

The people at Mozilla have produced a transcoding JPEG optimizer. https://github.com/mozilla/mozjpeg/releases This thing is sweet: it takes ordinary JPEG files and recompresses them much more efficiently without making the images deteriorate. It uses the long-standing and well-tested Independent JPEG Group reference implementation, and adds a bunch of optimizations. It’s not built for GUI users; it’s … Read more

Cost-effective Digital Signs

A digital sign is a big TV set in a public place showing information or possibly advertisements. Ideally a digital sign can show upcoming events, announcements, pictures, advertisements, and other stuff that’s relevant to a community of people who might look at the sign. How can you make a digital sign with off-the-shelf 2014 technology? … Read more

Resources for WordPress plugin development

PHP Manual   PHP The Right Way  Vagrant Opscode Chef Cookbook sources    php-o … some function wrappers Guidelines for theme development: some of this applies to plugins as well. Messing around with the new media manager   Gmail Modern HTML/CSS tutorial PDF metadata  http://framework.zend.com/manual/1.12/en/zend.pdf.info.html From the CODEX http://codex.wordpress.org/Writing_a_Plugin Hints and tips http://wp.smashingmagazine.com/2011/03/08/ten-things-every-wordpress-plugin-developer-should-know/ Best practices http://wp.smashingmagazine.com/2010/07/30/lessons-learned-from-maintaining-a-wordpress-plug-in/ … Read more

Shortpack — a WordPress plugin

What is Shortpack? This Shortpack plugin is a straight ripoff from Jetpack, containing just its media shortcodes.  I packaged it up it because of reliability problems I was having in the network connection between the wordpress.com servers and my hosting provider.  It provides the same shortcodes as Jetpack: archives, audio, blip, dailymotion, diggthis, flickr, googlemaps, … Read more

Setup for a new WordPress web site

WordPress setup is a task that some of us do a lot.  If you’re setting up a site on WordPress.com, you really don’t need to do much; it’s all done for you.  But if you’re setting up a WordPress.org-based site, you may find this little checklist helpful. Plugins When I set up a new web … Read more