Austin Ginder

Austin Ginder

Email Triggers for Simple History

Getting notified when critical plugins are updated is something I sometimes get asked about after a bad plugin update takes place. While there are many ways this can be accomplished, today I’m going to show how to trigger an email…

Local Lightning and Upgrading to WSL2

If you’re a web developer and using Windows, then WSL2 is an exciting upgrade. It’s Microsoft’s completely new Windows subsystem for Linux and comes with some pretty fantastic performance improvements. This week I upgraded from WSL v1 to v2 and…

Experimental Stackable WordPress Mode

WordPress can be configured as a standalone site or a multisite network. Ever since I wrote about Dynamically Load WordPress Database, I kept wondering if that method could be used to create a hybrid WordPress mode. After a weekend of…

Extracting Compressed Files from the Command Line

Spend enough time on the command line and your bound to memorize a few common commands like zip -r backup.zip wp-content/ and unzip backup.zip. Compressing files and extracting them is a very common task. If it was just the zip…

Performance Enhancements with Kinsta

I host over 1000 WordPress sites with Kinsta and am a huge fan of their hosting services. Performance related issues with Kinsta are almost always plugin and theme related. Kinsta support can enable New Relic’s tracking which is a great…

Common WordPress Maintenance Woes

Keeping WordPress running smoothly requires some routine maintenance. Most of the time that’s easily handled by regularly installing routine updates. However in rare cases routine maintenance can be a battle. Here are top 5 common WordPress maintenance woes and how…

Using Phpseclib Instead of Disallowed PHP exec

Many web hosts disable a handful of built-in PHP functions like exec for security sake. And for good reason. If your website would ever run harmful PHP code, having access to exec would be quite dangerous. As a developer, being…

Preserving Customizer Settings

Most themes utilize the WordPress Customizer in order to config and setup the website. Unfortunately, many of these settings are specific to whichever theme you are using. That means if you activate a new theme, you have to start over…

Self-hosting Jitsi Meet with Digital Ocean

Video conferencing usage is increasing exponentially. Google Hangouts has been my preferred tool however Google’s plans to phase it out in favor of their paid product Google Meet. Meanwhile Zoom is quickly becoming a household name. I don’t mind paying…

Maintenance Mode DIY Options

The WordPress.org plugin repository is filled with coming soon and maintenance mode plugins. My go-to plugin is the one created by SeedProd. However, I often don’t need all of those fancy features and prefer to just do it manually with…