From the wheelhouse

Notes from running the fleet

Security research, WordPress internals and the tooling behind Anchor. Written while doing the work, not after.

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…

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…

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…

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 That said it’s outdated and has performance issues when used with a…

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…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

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…