Two very popular content management systems are in their teenage years now: WordPress will be 14 this year, and MediaWiki will be 15. Those are a lot of years on the web. As teenagers, these two successful and interesting projects try and act like the adults they want to be. Unfortunately, this can lead to ... Read more
This is a terse collection of commands and utilities I find useful for shells. There is little distinction between programs and commands as commands are programs (and are installed or come pre-installed) and programs have commands. Also included is a shell (Fish Shell) and some other shell applications/utilities (Mosh, Nano). bc - basic calculator See ... Read more
Nano is pretty awesome, fully open source, and has mnemonics for most commands. Note that I use Fish Shell on OSX, CentOS and Ubuntu. Various benefits accrue, when scripting and also autocomplete and such. Various Commands and Such Set Nano as default editor of git in OSX Search and Replace Apparently this is also case ... Read more
If a phrase could sum up what we've seen so far in WordPress in 2017 it would be something like: > Bureaucratic nonsense, shitty design, tone deaf development. The Core crew and their work on Plugins has recently turned from tragedy to farce. While these hardworking plebes have put in the hours, their result is, ... Read more
Detecting a visitor's location can provide a semi-customized experience that can work out well. However, it can also lock visitors into an assumption that is incorrect, and that may create a worse experience. For example, changing default languages based on location is not a good idea (it is better to use cookies and reasonable defaults, ... Read more
Recently, I'm on a server that chrony just barfs on, so my preferred time mechanism doesn't work. Indeed, ntpdate doesn't work as well. Turns out that ntpdate is obsolete (or being obsoleted). After a lot of nonsense, it turns out that running ntpd from the commandline is possible, as long as it is not currently ... Read more
> Note: as of june 2018 I've discontinued use of Piwik. While it is reasonably good as a solution, the MySQL component requires too many resources, and frankly what it does better than Google Analytics in terms of actual data doesn't provide much value in my current use cases. Piwik is an open source, free ... Read more
Link disavowel is desired someone (a competitor, or simply a derranged troll) has created low-quality links to your site. In some cases, in competitive, global markets, this may actually be the result of perhaps hundreds of domains created for the purpose of wrecking large numbers of competitors by providing Google with evidence of negative behavior. ... Read more
As with security in general, escaping the scourge of WordPress form and content spam requires a layered approach. Here is what works. Databases and Behavioral Anti-Spam The first step is the one that nowadays works the least well. In the beginning we had Akismet, and things got better, but this is an arms race, and ... Read more
While there are Webmaster Tools for Naver and Webmaster Tools for Baidu, both of those do not have an English interface. While it is possible to muddle through, it would only be worthwhile if targeting the Chinese market (in China) or the Korean market (in Korea). Bing Webmaster Tools, Google Webmaster Tools, and Yandex Webmaster ... Read more