WordPress admin Pointers with navigation
WordPress admin pointers are generally used to give an introductory tour to where different features are in WordPress. They are mainly used by WordPress in the admin section to show you, especially after upgrades, where different (new) functionality is. In plugin development, they make it easy for you, the developer, to show off some features […]
Create Google Charts using MySQL data
While trying to create my own Google charts using MySQL data, the closest solution I found was this in Google’s documentation on how to do something similar. The code used there is: I disagree with the approach there because of one line in their code: That bit goes against the whole idea of AJAX. AJAX […]
Nagios event handlers for NRPE
I used to use custom scripts to monitor services and get alerts of failures till Bas Moussa introduced me to Nagios. Monitoring and self-healing has been flowers and rainbows since. Nagios event handlers allow you to put in place measures to self-heal your services. The Nagios documentation on setting them up is superb. How do […]
Adding screen options to a WordPress plugin
In WordPress, adding screen options during plugin development is not one of those things with a lot of documentation. There’s a great tutorial on this by Chris Marslender. There’s one here too by someone I’m a fan of, Pippin Williamson. Both went a long way to get me started. I differ from these approaches in […]
Interview with cloud architect Bas Moussa
Bas Moussa is the Chief Architect at Nuvole Computing LLC, a cloud consulting firm in San Francisco. He designed the firm’s reference architecture that implements cloud architecture in a way that fulfills the promises of cloud computing with maximum portability of components. He has been programming since he was 8 and has worked in Internet […]
How to update your local yum repo
There are a number of great resources on how to set-up a local yum repo. This one from Digital Ocean is particularly good: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-up-and-use-yum-repositories-on-a-centos-6-vps How though do you update the said yum repo? I needed to upgrade bash on some hosts to protect them against being ShellShock-ed. This required an upgrade to the local repo from which all these […]
Run a Java Application as a linux service
I needed to run a Java program as a service on a server running RHEL. I used the script below to get it working. I got direction from 1. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11203483/run-a-java-application-as-a-service-on-linux 2. http://www.apexninjas.com/blog/2011/02/start-java-program-as-linux-daemon/ and 3. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:SysVInitScript#Initscript_template The third link provides a detailed explanation on init scripts; I recommend that, at the very least, you skim through […]
Add WordPress Related Posts without a plugin
There are several articles out there on how to add WordPress related posts without using a plugin. I’m adding one more to the fray only because all the other posts do one thing; they match related posts based on those posts being in the same category or having the same tag as the current post. […]
WordPress Multiple Excerpt Lengths
There are times you need to have multiple excerpt lengths. You might have a page (usually the homepage) that in one section displays more text that it does in another section. As all things WordPress, there are a number of ways to do this. There might even be a number of plugins for this. You […]
Fix for jQuery selector not working
I stopped short of giving my PC a bath when for some strange reason, the jQuery selectors I was using weren’t working. Thing is when doing basic testing for jQuery, you’ll write something to console.log (either that or you’ll put an alert and wait for it to annoyingly pop-up ). Things were so bad, I did both! Many, many hoops later, […]