Austin Ginder

Austin Ginder

WordPress.com stats via API

Every site I maintain gets Jetpack installed with the Stats module activate. These stats are pretty basic. While they might not be as comprehensive as Google Analytics they are extremely powerful as they are accessible via the WordPress.com API. WordPress.com Rest…

Automating WP Engine’s User Portal with Ruby Script

There is a Ruby gem called Mechanize which is a powerful library for automating web interactions. While playing around with it over the course of a weekend I ended up making the following Ruby script can be run over the command line…

Bulk Domain Record Lookups with Bash

Looking up domain records is a common daily task. Most of the time I use a website called MX Toolbox. That works great for single lookup. On occasion I need to do a bulk lookup for group of websites. While…

Injecting a custom mu-plugin for FTP deployments on WP Engine

Sometimes FTP is your only option In a world where we have such amazing tools like WP-CLI it’s hard to imagine why you’d want to attempt scripting over FTP. WP Engine doesn’t allow SSH access and FTP was really the only option if I…

Manipulating Gravity Forms exports

Gravity Forms is my go to form plugin for WordPress. Recently a client asked to change the address state field to use state codes (example: PA) rather then full states (example: Pennsylvania). While I could replace the default address field…

Protecting static files with PHP script and WP Engine

There are many membership plugins for WordPress. A number of my customers run MemberPress which is a powerful and flexible membership plugin. I recently ran into a situation where images uploaded via the media library on restricted posts were getting…

Syncing Large Data with Rclone

Ever once in a while I find myself in a situation where I need to move a large amount of data between a cloud storage provider and my local computer. Like moving 20GBs of photos to Google or pulling down 40GBs of…

5 Ways to Sink a Potentially Great Website

The following was content for a presentation I did for Churchill Creative at their team meetup.  5 Ways to Sink a Potentially Great Website Make your menus as complicated as you can Overload your site with duplicate content Use sliders everywhere Make it as difficult as…

Tracing Emails To Their Source Website

Every now and again I get a real email but no idea who it’s for. It’s actually more common then I’d like to admit. The only thing identifiable is that it came from a WordPress site running Gravity Forms something…

Disconnecting from Jetpack via API

Jetpack is one of those plugins I require on all of my sites. It’s a beast of a plugin with many modules. The two modules I always use are Stats and Monitor. From time to time I receive down notifications…