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 Jetpack Stats. Rather than wait for an official Fathom API I decided to see…
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 work with that. My go-to has been to use a backup plugin. But still,…
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 sites organized by their usage stats. This would help identify top sites which might…
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 That said it’s outdated and has performance issues when used with a modern web host like Kinsta.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 remove Timthumb from a custom theme for one of my customers. Search for Timthumb…
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 sites from a WP Engine backup to Pantheon. Prepare sftp with Rclone and Terminus…
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 just script it. The following bash script will drop all database tables, install a fresh copy of WordPress and remove all themes, plugins and…
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 is hard to setup and PhantomJS had difficulty getting accurate website screenshots. While searching for a better tool I discovered gowitness a command line…
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 in Go. Learning Go has been on my todo list for a while now. During Christmas break 🎄- the span of 2 weeks –…
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 Jeff, one of Kinsta’s support engineers 🙏. Two types of SSH disconnects with Kinsta The most common type of disconnect happens due to inactivity.…
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 get better with the language you start to break things out into separate files as reusable modules. Bash is no different. One exception is…