Jason Cosper

Semper fudge.

Category: Linked

  • Simple Cache

    Taylor has been on fucking fire lately with plugin releases. Simple Cache does one thing — caching, natch — and it does it very well: Simple Cache was constructed after getting frustrated with the major caching plugins available and building sites with developer-only complex caching solutions that get millions of page views per day. If…

  • DuoTone Themes for Atom

    While I’m normally a Solarized Dark guy — seriously, I’ve Solarized Dark’d all the things on pretty much every computer I touch — these Atom syntax themes are really pleasant. I’ve been looking to change things up lately, so I’m going to try living with darkSea for the next month. I’ll let y’all know how it goes!

  • 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…

  • 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.

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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.

  • All the Options in the WordPress Theme Customizer

    In reality we’re taking the same problem of providing too many options and migrating them from the Dashboard to the WordPress Theme Customizer. Bummer. Tom McFarlin nails it once again.

  • wordpress-rest-api

    Speaking of JavaScript, here’s a Node.js-based client for the JSON REST API that’ll eventually make its way into WordPress core.