Blog

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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 with fresh settings. There is no good import/export functionality. There is one exception where…

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 for a good solution, but neither Google or Zoom have a great reputation for…

Maintenance Mode DYI 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 custom code. Today I’m sharing a few DYI maintenance mode options for web developers.…

Revamping a WordPress Website with Blocksy and Block Extensions

I spent a week revamping this website, anchor.host. That involved installing a new WordPress theme, pulling over a bit of custom code from the old theme and remaking a few pages using new blocks extensions. The backend of Anchor Hosting is highly dynamic. WooCommerce Subscriptions handles hosting customer renewals. There isn’t a good workflow…

Scripting Background Scripts on Kinsta

One of my favorite SSH commands with Kinsta is screen. I use it quite frequently to handle long running scripts like site migrations and image optimizations. I’ve often wondered if it would be possible to put screen inside of a shell script instead of manually running it from the command line. Today that’s just…

Over The Air Shell Scripts

So you just finished writing this super awesome shell script, now the question is “How do I run it?”. There are many ways you can run a shell script. You can run a script locally, run a local script on a remote server via ssh, or you can copy and run it directly on…

Lighting Fast WordPress Themes ⚡

When building WordPress websites for customers, I feel the best approach is to do a custom designed and developed theme using something like Underscores as a starter theme combined with Advanced Custom Fields. There is just nothing like building up a website from scratch with just the features that the customer needs. No bloat…

Configuring Vanity Nameservers

I’ve been using a premium DNS provider since 2014 and only recently switched to use vanity nameservers. This will be a walk through showing the steps I took to setup vanity nameservers using Constellix (DNS Provider) and Hover (Domain Provider) for anchor.host. Step 1: Add new A records to primary domain. First find the…

Announcing Vanity Nameservers

Announcement

I’ve finally done it. I’ve setup vanity nameservers for Anchor Hosting. Effective immediately all customers can use these branded nameservers rather then the previous Constellix nameservers. The DNS provider is still Constellix. Constellix is an amazing DNS provider. Literally zero performance or reliable issues. I have no reason to switch to another provider. Under…

Consolidating Mailgun Accounts

On March 1st 2020, Mailgun will be phasing out their free tier. I’m a happy paying Mailgun customer. How is this going to affect me? Well, over the last several years I created a number of separate free Mailgun accounts for various hosting customers. All these free accounts have my credit card details on…