Jason Cosper

Blog

  • Blinded By The Lights

    *sigh* I’ll never get tired of looking at this city all lit up.

  • Wordthumb

    For the folks who don’t have the time or the technical knowledge to change over to the Post Thumbnail support built into WordPress, WordThumb (a secure fork & rewrite of TimThumb) should make tightening up your sites a bit easier. [via]

  • Google Page Speed Service and Large Uploads in WordPress

    So Google’s Page Speed Service looks pretty great – but if you get into the beta and upload a lot of media to your WordPress site, you’re going to run into a few snags. The cap for their caching proxy is currently set at 2MB. And while that’s fine for most folks, it’s not really going to fly for photobloggers and the like.

    Fortunately, there’s a workaround…

    All you need to do is create a subdomain (like admin.domain.com) and point it at your current WordPress install’s directory. If you don’t know how to do this, your web host’s support should be able to help you out.

    Now you’ll notice that when you visit that new URL, you’ll get redirected to your main domain. WordPress needs to know to not do that, so just add this code to your “wp-config.php” file:

    define('WP_HOME', 'http://'.$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']);
    define('WP_SITEURL', 'http://'.$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']);

    It doesn’t really matter where you drop it, but I like to put this sort of stuff after the MySQL information. Then just save out the file, kill your browser cache and try to visit your subdomain now.

    So long as things don’t keep trying to redirect you, log into your WordPress Dashboard (admin.domain.com/wp-admin/) and you should be able to post and upload files without any issues.

    Simple enough, right?

  • No More TimThumb

    With all of the hubbub around TimThumb, it’s probably a good time to point people to this handy guide on replacing it with functionality that’s already baked into WordPress.

  • Artisan 8-bit Photo Booth

    If you don’t already follow me on Twitter, you probably don’t know that I launched a new project last week. So take a minute and go check out Hipster Ipsum. You know, if you want to.

    I’ll admit that it’s kind of stupid — and making fun of hipsters is way played out by now — but this is one of those ideas that has been kicking around in my head for a while. And rather than just letting it flop around in my brainpan until someone else made it, I decided to carve out a little of my free time and actually ship it.

    I’m pretty happy with the results too. Here’s some of the text it’s generating:

    Jean shorts aliqua magna mollit. Whatever est leggings put a bird on it aesthetic sint tempor butcher. Keytar gluten-free fuck sustainable. Portland aesthetic chambray, Readymade nulla 8-bit bahn mi Austin keffiyeh Four Loko letterpress. Veniam skateboard deserunt vinyl nisi fugiat. Lo-fi accusamus sapiente, pariatur tofu aesthetic do leggings deserunt organic quis consequat.

    I’m sure that there’s plenty of hipster cliches that I’ve missed. So if you check out the site and see any that I might be missing, don’t hesitate to let me know!

  • This Comment Intentionally Left Blank

    So I’ve started running into some folks who have been getting comment moderation emails from their WordPress installs that look like this:

    From: WordPress <wordpress@example.com>
    Date: May 12, 2011 16:20
    Subject: [WordPress] Please moderate: “Hello World!”
    To: admin@example.com

    A new comment on the post “Hello World!” is waiting for your approval
    http://example.com/hello-world/

    Author : (IP: , )
    E-mail :
    URL :
    Whois : http://whois.arin.net/rest/ip/
    Comment:

    Approve it: http://example.com/wp-admin/comment.php?action=approve&c=0
    Trash it: http://example.com/wp-admin/comment.php?action=trash&c=0
    Spam it: http://example.com/wp-admin/comment.php?action=spam&c=0
    Currently 0 comments are waiting for approval. Please visit the moderation panel: http://example.com/wp-admin/edit-comments.php?comment_status=moderated

    Now I didn’t go and redact any information there — the emails are totally void of any comment data outside of the moderation links. That’s not right at all.

    So why does this happen? The answer is actually really simple. Almost embarrassingly so.

    To put it as plainly as possible, when comment moderation emails start showing up as blank, the wp_comments table has gone missing. If you look at some of your more popular posts or your comments panel, you’ll notice that everything is missing.

    It’s almost like your mom doesn’t even read your blog.

    Sometimes the table has completely disappeared, sometimes it’s just in need of a repair — but either way, you need to restore it to working order to make your comments happy again. And since hosts vary, I’m not going into the grizzly details of running that restore. I’m sure there’s plenty of nerds on the internet who’d be happy to help tho.

    Addendum: I’d like to hope that you’re backing up your install and database regularly. And if you’re not, maybe your hosting company is. Any worthwhile host will. But you should never ever depend on a single point of failure. I like to keep around 3 to 5, but I’m sort of paranoid.

    Remember, there’s never such a thing as too many backups!

    Good luck!

  • The Ol’ Switcheroo

    After a year of running this domain under nginx with XCache, I’ve decided to roll things back over to Apache for the time being.

    While nginx has been great when it came to system resources, I’ve never been able to get it to play nicely with Super Cache. I mean, things were caching just fine — but expired stuff hung around forever. And while I like my tweets, photos and Pinboard links from a few days ago, I’d rather show my visitors fresh content.

    Besides, I’ve seriously been itching to use mod_pagespeed and PHP 5.3 on my personal site. And since neither of those things are available under the DreamHost install of nginx, my hand was forced.

    But not all hope is lost! Being the huge nerd that I am, I’ll probably switch back to nginx once PHP-FPM support gets added into the DreamHost PHP 5.3 install.

  • Jobs in Carbonite

    Fucking. Epic.

    Oh, it’s also happens to be available as an iPhone case or skin.

    You know, if you’re into that sort of thing.

  • PS22 Chorus + Freelance Whales

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRa2HUEN4po
    I seriously love the version of “Generator ^ First Floor” that the PS22 Chorus did here. It’s pretty damn epic.

    Then again, it doesn’t hurt that the Freelance Whales are hanging out and backing them up. Great, great, great song.

  • La La Love You

    Sarah + Jason

    5 years ago tonight, Sarah told me that she loved me.

    After all this time, it’s still one of the things that I play over and over in my head. And I smile every time I think about it.

    Happy St. Paddy’s Day, baby.