Ctrl blog

Enough of WordPress

WordPress no longer makes me happy so I’m changing it out for something that does.

Link blog archive pages together to avoid navigational dead-ends

How to help visitors and search engines better navigate through your yearly blog archives: Provide links from year to year!

Structure WordPress’ upload directory to handle lots of files

Here is how to structure WordPress’ upload directory for scale. Sticking thousands of image files in one directory can cause performance problems.

WordPress with PHP GD’s image resize artifact-pattern problem

PHP GD graphics library (libgd) causes bad artifact-patterns when downsizing images. Makes images bigger and quality lower.

Set a custom /path for WordPress search result pages

How to set up custom /search URLs for your WordPress installation.

Tutorial: WordPress brute-force login protection with SSHGuard

Protect your WordPress install against brute-force password guessing with SSHGuard.

Don’t register your domains with Automattic

I’d registered my Ctrl.blog domain with Get.blog. That service no longer exists and my domain was transferred to WordPress.com without notice.

WordPress plugin adds Google Analytics UTM parameters to feeds

How to add URL parameters to track click-throughs from your WordPress RSS feeds in Google Analytics.

WordPress’ Jetpack plugin broke IPv6 support

Don’t blindly “cut off ports” after the first colon to “convert” a socket address (<IP>:<PORT>) to an IP address.

The allure of Textpattern: Why I never chose it as my CMS

My review of Textpattern. It has all the traits of a good CMS and WordPress alternative but never quite made the cut.

The not always Simplenote

Simplenote is a great note-taking service, but the apps and service have some serious issues with syncing.

Feed Delta Updates plugin for WordPress

Reduce the bandwidth cost of your WordPress RSS feeds using Feed Deltas.

Plugin for deleting commenters’ IP addresses from WordPress

How to automatically delete the IP address of commenters from your WordPress database.

Cache-Control plugin for WordPress

Take control over your WordPress site’s HTTP Cache-Control header directives with easy-to-use WordPress plugin.

Store WordPress commenter data in localStorage rather than cookies

How to move commenter data from cookies to localStorage. Reduces the amount of personal data transmitted with every HTTP request to your servers.

Internet Archive plugin for WordPress

Plugin for automatically archiving everything you publish and link to in the Internet Archive.

How to block common WordPress vulnerability probes

Protect your WordPress installation against bots probing for known WordPress core and plugin security vulnerabilities.

Block repeated 403 Forbidden requests with Fail2Ban

Protect yourself against repeated users and bots who don’t get the hint the first couple of times your web server responds with HTTP 403 Forbidden.

Why I dropped static-site generators in favor of WordPress

I moved from Nikola to WordPress and it wasn’t an easy decision. Here is what motivated me to make the move.