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Moving 500+ sites to Kinsta

Over the past 6 months I’ve worked with Kinsta to move over 500+ sites from WP Engine. This will be my official review and recap of that massive switchover. I’ll just begin with a spoiler and say I couldn’t be…

ACF Custom Fields Stored in Custom Table

Within CaptainCore, my WordPress management toolkit, I have a custom post type named captcore_website which stores site details via many ACF custom fields. The number of necessary custom fields seems to be never ending as I continue to expand functionality.…

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 collecting site stats for all of my WordPress customers with intent to reduce my reliance on…

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 limited access on the source WordPress site. Many times I’m only giving WordPress admin access and…

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 comparing sites. With a dedicated WP Engine server it would be extremely helpful to see all…

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 That said it’s outdated and has performance issues when used with a modern web host like Kinsta. The following is a walkthrough showing the steps I took to…

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 I wrote a script to automate the deployment process which allowed me to quickly resync the…

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 few times and decided I should just script it. The following bash script will drop all…

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 Selenium however was left unimpressed. Selenium is hard to setup and PhantomJS had difficulty getting accurate…

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, gowitness, Restic and Wpress-Extractor all written in Go. Learning Go has been on my todo list…