Austin Ginder

Austin Ginder

Smarter Site Monitor in Bash

For the last number of months I’ve been using my own site monitor. It’s been great and terrible all at the same time. It’s great as it’s uncovered many issues that were missed by Jetpack Monitor. That’s due to my…

Bulk Renaming Meta Fields

Most of the time when working with meta fields I’ll use Advanced Custom Fields. One place where I don’t use ACF is within CaptainCore CLI where data is stored directly into meta fields using WP-CLI. I recently wanted to rename…

Image Optimization for Web Servers

When it comes to image optimization, my go to WordPress plugin is WP Smush Pro. That said there are times I want to do more than what a plugin can handle. I recently had a customer who had over 50GBs…

Moving 500+ sites to Kinsta

Over the past 6 months I’ve worked with Kinsta to move over 500+ sites from WP Engine. This will be my official review and recap of that massive switchover. I’ll just begin with a spoiler and say I couldn’t be…

ACF Custom Fields Stored in Custom Table

Within CaptainCore, my WordPress management toolkit, I have a custom post type named captcore_website which stores site details via many ACF custom fields. The number of necessary custom fields seems to be never ending as I continue to expand functionality.…

Extracting Stats from a Fathom Instance

Back in October of 2018 Fathom, the open source web analytics project, added support to track multiple websites per instance. Since then I’ve been collecting site stats for all of my WordPress customers with intent to reduce my reliance on…

WordPress as an Experimental Rclone HTTP Remote

Whenever I migrate WordPress sites I prefer that to be handled by a command line script. Well that’s not always possible often due to limited access on the source WordPress site. Many times I’m only giving WordPress admin access and…

Bulk Processing WP Engine Usage Stats

WP Engine provides a downloadable CSV usage stats per site. This is great for seeing individual site activity however it’s not very useful for comparing sites. With a dedicated WP Engine server it would be extremely helpful to see all…

Removing Timthumb from a Custom Theme

Timthumb was a very popular php script for dynamically generating thumbnail images. That said it’s outdated and has performance issues when used with a modern web host like Kinsta. The following is a walkthrough showing the steps I took to…

WP Engine to Pantheon Migration

Recently I helped a customer move their site from WP Engine to Pantheon. Pantheon’s platform is quite different then WP Engine. During the process I wrote a script to automate the deployment process which allowed me to quickly resync the…