We have been working on automating large parts of the content ordering on Metro.co.uk since our responsive redesign in Dec ’12. This has grown from managing a few widgets across the site to controlling the majority of the homepage. The below describes the process we went through to achieve this. The first step was to […]
I have just setup some 301 redirects in order to remove /development from the URL of my blog and wrote a handy piece of SQL to simplify 301 redirect WordPress blog htaccess. Once you have made the changes you can update your redirects /wp-admin/options-permalink.php. The reason I am redirecting to the guid which is the […]
I needed a simple SQL script to help me restore WordPress backup localhost to ensure that I didn’t have to go through the pain every time that I wanted to bring my data to my local server. This worked really well and all you need to do is search and replace on local.blog to the […]
I have decided to give my server the final boost in my quest for ultimate cachability and install Varnish cache. It was a toss up between doing this and installing NGINX but I have a reasonably large set of rules in my .htaccess to prevent hackers and 301s so I figured the migration would be […]
I run a small WordPress network on an Amazon Micro Instance and this means that I need to stay on top of caching. Having had a look around at a lot of different options I decided that I would use Batcache and Memcache to provide me with in memory caching should one of my posts […]
WordPress hacker attacks have been on the rise this year and although I haven’t been hacked (touch wood) they have managed to overload my site on a number of occasions. I have been on a quest to stop them getting in and also to reduce the instances of their repeated entry attempts taking it down. […]
I spent this morning running the PageSpeed Insights tool in Google Chrome over this website and it came back with some good tips on how to speed up WordPress Apache to make this site run faster. I thought I would share how I approached making the recommended changes below. The first critical issue that it threw up […]
As I previously wrote Metro decided to use the WordPress VIP platform for their CMS and front end, this post will detail how we set about the initial part of the project to give it the best chance of success. Initially it was pretty daunting looking forwards 12 months with the sheer scale of the […]
Why Metro decided to choose WordPress VIP as their CMS and front end platform including a few things to watch out for if you take this path.
I have been working on migrating a website I did for a friend a while ago from an old ASP.NET application I built to my WordPress Amazon EC2 Instance over the last few weekends as the old server we were using for hosting is being retired. I have been working on a temporary domain whilst […]