Conferences for 2013
2012 was a great for learning and travelling. I started off the year by going to South by south west in Austin back in March, followed by Future of Insights in Vegas early May, WordCamp Sydney in...
View ArticleBatch resizing 45,000 images in WordPress
A site I am working on has a unique problem, where we need to batch re-size all existing media attachments, in order for all the previous pictures to fit into the new template. Although this problem in...
View ArticleMy first WordPress Amazon deployment
Earlier this month I rolled out my first Amazon based WordPress install, and it was an interesting learning experience for a number of reasons. I thought I’d outline some of the bumps along the road I...
View ArticleCaching content and bringing it closer to home
I wrote a little while ago about my first Amazon setup for hosting a WordPress install, and one of the objectives was to have it hosted out of the USA, but use Amazon’s Route53 service to geo-route the...
View ArticleSetting a cookie & showing a popup to mobile users w/ jQuery
I needed to have a quick popup that only showed to iOS devices that suggested they download the app for the website, and set a cookie to only show this popup once a month. Doing PHP detection of...
View ArticleManaged WordPress Hosting – reasons why I don’t want it
One blog I do like following is Chris Lema’s, if you don’t read it already, you should… he’s a very clever chap. One post I read recently (Managed WordPress Hosting – Reasons You Need It), and I also...
View ArticleLockdown WordPress users to one login session
Earlier in the year, I was working on a WordPress powered member site, that gave the users access to restricted content for members only. Pretty simple concept. The client however, wanted to sell...
View ArticleSwitching between two WordPress themes for mobile sites and Batcache
Fellow WordPress developer James Collins blogged about the wp_is_mobile() function which is a handy core function you can use for mobile detection (betcha you’d never have guessed that!). I actually...
View ArticleTalk from WordCamp Melbourne 2013
Here is my talk from WordCamp Melbourne 2013. As a first time talker at an event like this, it was reassuring to have people come up after and give me feedback, and chat about the topic I spoke on. I...
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Go to more than just WordCamps
This time last week I was in Barcelona, Spain, where I attended the WebVisions conference. WebVisions was great, there were a few really good talks I enjoyed, covering UX design, new CSS3 stuff,...
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Exceptional Service
On Saturday I listened to Troy Dean speak at WordCamp Melbourne about 101 ways to elevate yourself above the pack and demand more greater fees/rates. Some of these points were things like; send your...
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Dinner at Euro
It’s no secret, I’m a fan of nice food. Just over a year ago I was introduced to Euro restaurant in Auckland, and it’s become one of my favourites. Euro do a kick-ass job in my opinion (albeit very...
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Up up and away & switched off
Early next week I’m headed off for a two week break to Europe. Leading up to this flight, (and most), I get excited. One of the things I look forward to the most is being able to get onto a plane, and...
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WordPress development – creating a new site via the command line
At Alyte, we work with a couple of different groups of clients. One of those groups are the smaller business sites, smaller, simpler WordPress sites that we don’t put on version control, and usually...
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Unproductively productive
It’s a challenge I’ve been struggling with for many years, and I’m sure I’m not alone – how to manage projects, tasks and stuff! Well after 3-4 years of trialling different systems, wasting countless...
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When valuing your time, don’t forget experience – nobody has the same
Picasso is sketching at a park. A woman walks by, recognizes him, and begs for her portrait. Somehow, he agrees. A few minutes later, he hands her the sketch. She is elated, excited about how...
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MySQL Backups that don’t break character encoding
When it comes to MySQL backups / restores, I’ve always been a user of the textbook example: mysqldump -u root -p[root_password] [database_name] > dumpfilename.sql However, there is a better way! In...
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Beanstalk – A story to perfection
Who didn’t love 2008? To me, it was my 60′s era; Cowboy Coding was just the normal way to do things – even for the very few medium-to-large sites I worked on back then. Alas, this wasn’t to be forever;...
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Super fast WordPress hosting using Plesk 11.5
On the servers I run, I’ve always preferred Plesk over say, CPanel or the other options out there. It has it’s fair share of quirks, but overall it’s a very stable & reliable platform for web...
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Web Directions South 2013
For the final conference I’ll attend in 2013, I spent the last two days of last week down in Sydney for Web Directions South. After a couple year break from WDS, it was great to be back and a reminder...
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