Bulk User Removal for WordPress Sites
Recently a web agency asked if I could remove a list of WordPress accounts, if found, from all of their websites. They gave me a list of 15 old email account of which they wanted removed from their 42 sites.…
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Digging into Local by Flywheel’s Virtual Machine
I’m a big fan of Laravel’s Valet for local WordPress development. However after wasting a day attempting to fix a bug with Valet I decided to give Local by Flywheel a try. Spending my day attempting to resolve an obscure…
Deploying Paid Plugins
Paid plugins often rely on license keys for automatic updates and support requests. However it’s the wild west when it comes to how their licensing systems work. Seems like every plugin author ends up implementing their own licensing system. I…
Easily Avoidable Website Outages
Site monitors are a good way to detect major issues with websites. Over the years I’ve begun to notice a few common reasons why websites go offline. You might be shocked to know that most times it has nothing to…
Moving a VPS from Digital Ocean to Google Cloud
WordPress websites need to managed by someone who can keep after things 24/7 if you wish sleep well at night. That’s why for hosting WordPress websites I rely on managed WordPress hosts like Kinsta. Kinsta has the staff and sysadmins…
Phone Support Hacks from Google Voice to Twilio ☎️
I have a confession: I really don’t like using my phone for business. If you are a customer of Anchor Hosting, I do my best to hide this fact. Don’t get me wrong, there are situations where a simple phone…
Find and Replace Hardcoded File References
Generally finding and replacing old URLs can easily be accomplished using WP-CLI’s search-replace command. However that only makes changes to the database. Hard-coded file references may still exist. This can be handled with a few commands over SSH, however if…
Fathom’s Internal API
I’m a big fan of Fathom Analytics. It’s the perfect alternative to Google Analytics and something I’ve been using since early 2018. One thing Fathom lacks is an official API which lead me to do some pretty crazy monkey patching…
WP-CLI Database Backups with Emojis
My preferred way to backup a WordPress site is directly on the web server using SSH. The database backup part is performed with WP-CLI like so: This will output a .sql file which can easily be imported. I’ve been using…
WordCamp Lancaster 2019
This year I spoke at WordCamp Lancaster, the annual one day WordPress conference here in my home town. I gave a talk in the beginner track titled The Lean Mean Maintenance Machine. It was an overview of why maintenance is…