The Blog
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Takeaways from Scott Hanselman’s “Scaling Yourself”
Recently a video hit my inbox. It’s a presentation from Scott Hanselman at GOTO conf talking about how to scale your own productivity. Yet another productivity video. I’m a notorious multitasker and my email is always open, responding to the latest thing to hit my inbox, potentially dropping everything to work on something new. He…
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Powering WordPress with Auto-Scaling AWS RDS
Sterner Stuff recently inherited a pretty massive site. With over 100,000 posts, 200,000 attachments, and site loads reaching 4000+ visitors and anywhere from 5-9 logged-in authors at any one time, it’s been one of the largest projects we’ve tackled. While a proper reverse-proxy solution can mitigate the majority of the front-end load on a project…
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Use Laravel Spark Notifications Without Breaking Laravel’s Default Database Notifications
Laravel Spark is a pretty nifty framework that allows you to get up and running quickly with your next software-as-a-service (SaaS) idea. I’ve used it in a couple places, including my leads group management platform called Pond. One of the many features it includes is a notifications system. The system supports two kinds of notifications:…
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2019 PHP Benchmarks – Why You Need PHP 7+
2019 is just around the corner, and with it comes Kinsta’s annual PHP benchmarking. You can check out their full post, or keep reading for a quick look at the stuff most important to WordPress or Laravel users. What is PHP and How Does it Affect SEO? PHP is the server language that powers popular…
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Baking the Perfect Christmas Cookie
Christmas is nothing without trees, stockings, and Santa. While most of us can handle trimming the tree and hanging our stockings, Santa has a few expectations before he comes bounding down the chimney. Mainly: You have to be nice all year! You have to leave cookies If you don’t feel confident that you’ve been nice,…
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FREE Gutenberg Webinar!
WordPress’s Gutenberg editor is here. It’s big, shiny, and a little scary. But it’s the future of WordPress! Features are going to be built around it, and while using the Classic Editor plugin means you don’t have to adopt the new editor right away, you’re only punting the football down the field. In my world,…
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Function to Check if Divi is Active
There are times you may want your WordPress page templates to behave differently depending on whether or not a page builder has been enabled on it. For example, I built out a custom page template for a client that had content that was populated via custom fields, but also space for whatever was in the…
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Customizing the InfinteWP Backup Storage Directory
InfiniteWP (IWP) is a centralized management solution for WordPress sites. For someone who manages a large number of WordPress sites, it’s a great way to manage backups, roll out emergency updates, and more, all from one place. All my ongoing clients are hosted on their own VPS at Digital Ocean. This allows me to scale…
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Google Chrome’s SSL Update
Still putting off an SSL, huh? Please Just Help Me Install an SSL! An SSL is the difference on your website between http and https. This horse is dead, but I’ll keep on beating. Here’s why you need an SSL: Establish greater trust between you and your users Rank better in search engines Have a…
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WordPress Security Basics
This blog post is actually from my wicked-awesome WordPress for Small Business Owners course. If you dig it, you should sign up for the whole thing. It’s totally free! Take the Free Course! If your website is already hacked… You’re welcome to follow this guide and go through the steps to secure your website, but…
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How to Manage Those Pesky Business Cards
Are you at your desk? If not, imagine it. Look left. Look right. If you’re anything like me, there’s probably a very specific kind of mess staring back at you. Piles. Big stuff on the bottom, little stuff on top, stacked “neatly” for you to go through at some unspecified later time, which you recurringly…
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