Jason Cosper

Semper fudge.

Year: 2015

  • Reasons for Custom Tables and an API

    When it comes to storing large amounts of data that does not very closely mimic existing WordPress database schemas, you should absolutely use custom tables. Choosing not to use a custom table will likely cause more harm than good. While it’s possible to store almost anything you want as a custom post type in the wp_posts…

  • Gotta Podcatch ‘Em All

    A couple great WordPress podcasts — WP Dev Table and WPwatercooler — have been nice enough to have me on as a guest recently. Instead of having you dig around each site to find the episodes, I’ll just go ahead and leave them here… As you can see, I’m a pretty insightful guy. Humble too. Want to have me…

  • The Big List of Naughty Strings

    The Big List of Naughty Strings is an evolving list of strings which have a high probability of causing issues when used as user-input data. This is intended for use in helping both automated and manual QA testing; useful for whenever your QA engineer walks into a bar.

  • What to Expect When Expecting Content Security Policy Reports

    Zach Tollman goes deep on Content Security Policy reporting in browsers.

  • Shortcake Bakery

    Shortcake + Shortcake Bakery = Easy PDF, JavaScript, iFrame, Facebook post, Scribd & Genius embeds from the team at Fusion. There’s also a really nice image comparison tool. If you’re into that sort of thing. Which I am.

  • Scaling WordPress queries with Elasticsearch

    File under: Cool shit you can do with Elasticsearch.

  • Stop using tail -f (mostly)

    Despite using the less command frequently, I had no clue that it could be used in place of tail -f. So useful!

  • The WordPress Talent Shortage Might Be a Pricing Problem

    An interesting article — and ensuing discussion down in the comments — from Andy Adams. Definitely worth a read if you make even just a fraction of your living from doing WordPress dev work.

  • Too Many Images

    I love single use command line tools. This one helps you determine a URL’s image weight and even lets you know where you should start optimizing.

  • Implementing Public Key Pinning

    While HPKP — which helps reduce the attack surface for man-in-the-middle attacks against HTTPS traffic — is only supported in a very small handful of recent Chrome and Firefox builds, it never hurts to get ahead of the curve. Especially when it comes to your site’s security.

  • Cacio e Pepe Ramen

    In a flash of epicurean genius, Sarah decided to whip up a batch of David Chang‘s Cacio e Pepe Ramen for dinner last night. And while it’s not something I’d eat all the time — it was actually super rich — I wouldn’t be against downing another bowl of it at some point in the (nearish) future.

  • Debunking the Hot Buttered Hype

    Great in-depth analysis from Gizmodo covering every last bullshit claim made about Bulletproof Coffee.

  • WPScan Licensing

    It looks like the WordPress security tool WPScan is looking to move away from the GNU GPL license for their software. That’s rather unfortunate, but after reading about companies trying to repackage and sell WPScan as their own work, I totally get where they’re coming from. Chasing these companies takes time, sometimes a whole day of emails…

  • I’m in Love With the PAKO

    While I never bought into the Flappy Bird hype, I totally get the appeal of infuriatingly brief casual games. So I decided to try out PAKO after finding it over the weekend. The TL;DW (too long; didn’t watch) of the video above is this: Pick a closed, arena-style level. Don’t crash. Avoid cops. Even though I haven’t…

  • Making Your Own High Performance WordPress Server

    Clever forks of WP Engine’s Mercury Vagrant for the “roll your own server” types courtesy of Zach Adams. I say “forks” because he’s actually crafted two different Ansible playbooks. One deploys  WordPress, HHVM, Percona, PHP-FPM & nginx to a server of your choosing while the other adds Varnish, Memcached & APC to the mix. I have a…

  • MyFitnessPal doesn’t use HTTPS

    When logged into MyFitnessPal, all of the pages transmit over insecure HTTP. Everything you eat, your body measurements, your daily activity, and any activity imported from third party services are all transmitted insecurely over HTTP. If you’re on a public wi-fi network, anyone can easily intercept this private health information. Even worse, if you manually…

  • WordPress SEO Tamer

    Love Yoast’s WordPress SEO but hate some of the clutter that it brings to your dashboard? There’s a plugin for that. This plugin also — as Joost points out — breaks the business model that supports WordPress SEO’s development by blocking the ads for Yoast’s other plugins & services. You can turn the ads back on in…

  • Little Bad Days

    I used to have some little bad days, and I kept them in a little box. And one day, I threw them out into the yard. “Oh, it’s just a couple little innocent bad days.” Well, we had a big rain. I don’t know what it was growing in but I think we used to…

  • Deploy Elasticsearch on Google Compute Engine

    Thanks to Google, you can now quickly spin up an Elasticsearch instance for a few dollars a month. Couple that with WordPress plugins like ElasticPress & ES_WP_Query and you can get some pretty nice performance boosts in places where folks don’t normally bother to optimize.

  • WP Performance Profiler

    The crew at interconnect/it makes some quality stuff, so I’m pretty excited to try this out.