A few weeks ago I mentioned the wesley.pl script from GitHub to optimize images, and how I had modified it to keep (or discard) the EXIF / XMP information. Making sure images are as small as possible is important to save bandwidth and improve page load times (and google rank), so I think it’s worth discussing my image optimization process in more detail.
Using regular expressions to get at single values is quick and easy, but I wanted to create arrays for rdf:li values, and split each lr:hierarchicalSubject keyword into an additional second-dimension array.
To improve page load times (and Google ranking), you should make sure all jpeg, png, and gif files are properly optimized. Instead of writing my own script for jpegtran, pngcrush, and gifsicle, I used Mike Brittain’s Wesley.pl script on GitHub. It works great, though I did have to modify it to change the “jpegtran -copy” […]
Plugins often create their own folders under ./wordpress/wp-content/ without considering that directory indexing might be turned on, or that files within that folder are located under a DocumentRoot, and thus available to anyone. Some configuration files are also vulnerable in this way — the wp-config.php file, for example.
Are you frustrated by the lack of autocomplete in root’s shell on Mac OS X? I’ve tried a few different solutions, and the easiest / simplest I found is to create an /etc/inputrc file with the following text.
Autossh is a small front-end for SSH that can monitor the connection, and restart the tunnel if it drops or stops responding. I that found the startup scripts available for autossh on the internet were a little too basic for my needs — I wanted autossh to start multiple connections, and to start/stop each one individually if I needed — so I wrote my own.
I wrote a bash script this morning to report the size of Wordpress cache folders, the number of files they contain, read each file to prime the OS disk cache, and optionally flush the OS disk cache as well. This might be a script you could execute to email a daily/weekly report of cache folder sizes, or perhaps execute during/after booting a server to prime the OS disk cache, or even on a regular schedule to make sure the OS cache is always primed.
I recently added some disk caching for MySQL queries, Wordpress objects, PHP opcode, and PHP web pages on my server. There are several different caching techniques and applications available, and memcached seems like one of the more popular ones. Right or wrong, it appears to be the default go-to for many developers these days. Since I’m a SysAdmin by profession (with maybe a penchant for scripting and integration), I tend to have a more “systems” oriented approach — which led me to first consider, and then choose disk caching over memcached. In this post, I’ll outline the reasons I chose disk caching, and why in most circumstances it might be superior to memcached.