Austin Ginder

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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 That said it’s outdated and has performance issues when used with a modern web host like Kinsta.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…

  • 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…

  • Reset WordPress to Default

    A common customer request I get is to reset a WordPress staging site back to its default state. I’ve done this manually quite a few times and decided I should…

  • Website Screenshots with Gowitness

    There are many reasons why you might want to automate website screenshots. I’ve previously attempted to do this with development tools like PhantomJS and Selenium however was left unimpressed. Selenium…

  • Writing a Dispatch API Backend Server in Go

    I first encountered the programming language Go back in 2015 while making a Github issue for Rclone. Since then I’ve used tools like Fathom, gowitness, Restic and Wpress-Extractor all written…

  • Long Running Scripts Over SSH with Kinsta

    I recently discovered a hidden gem with Kinsta’s SSH environment. They have a built in option for performing a background process using the screen command. Huge thanks for this tip goes to…

  • The Art of Writing a Fully Self-contained Bash Script

    Bash is amazingly powerful and yet not the easiest thing to learn. When learning any new computer language it’s natural to write everything in a very long single file. As you…