Category Archives: General

Just general stuff, mostly random

10 Years Using WordPress

Posted by in General

Ten years ago, this blog was created. Sure, I had written a few posts on another platform. However, it was ten years ago that I made my first post within WordPress (version 1.5 at the time). JD had just setup a WordPress install for me on Weblogs.us, and the post was a simple “This is my new blog” type post (no longer available).

Since then, I adopted and rewrote a plugin that is now approaching 2 Million downloads and an estimated 300k active users. By no means was this my first plugin, and it is not the last one I will create (something new will be arriving late this summer). While I had been playing with (x)HTML and CSS for years before WordPress even existed, I learned PHP through extending WordPress—some purists may cringe at the thought, but that is not my problem.

Additionally, I have had the opportunity to be a server administrator for Weblogs.us, starting back when we still ran Apache on Windows. Since that time, we’ve moved to Gentoo/Funtoo Linux VM guests on top of the hardware. And, in late May, we will begin migrating select Weblogs.us users to new Nginx+PHP-FPM setup running on top of some new hardware.

Lastly, I’ve attended 6 WordCamps, and have presented at 5 of them on 6 different topics in 8 sessions. This includes all 3 times WordCamp Minneapolis has been held, thus far. This year, I plan on attending more WordCamps than I’ve been able to in the past (really want to get to Austin and out to the West Coast). Not only are they a great excuse to see new cities, they are a great place to meet members of the WordPress community in person.

-John Havlik

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Using ImageMagick to Batch Convert Photos

Posted by in General > Guides

Back when I posted my photoset from WordCamp Minneapolis 2013, rather than performing any post processing, I just uploaded the full images from my camera’s SD card. Normally, I would open up the Gimp and reduce the resolution by 50% and then crop to a 3:2 or 16:10 ratio depending on what was appropriate for the images. This produces small files that are easy for the server to handle.

Since WordPress generally does a good job generating the image sizes it needs, I didn’t worry about uploading the full, unreduced images. Normally, the end users would never see the full size images, so no harm, right? Wrong. At least if you use Jetpack.

If you use the tiled gallery feature in Jetpack (like I do on this site) you end up using the WordPress.com CDN. Unfortunately, Jetpack tries to load the full image size when caching for the tiled gallery. Trying to pull 50 or so images, at 1 MiB to 2 MiB a piece to cache didn’t work too well. Naturally, Jetpack could do things slightly more intelligently and request for the closest, already existing, image size to be used, but that’s a topic for another day.

To get things to play nicely I needed to reduce the ‘original’ file sizes. Thankfully, Weblogs.us has ImageMagick installed. Thus, fixing the issue was as simple as running:

convert P*.jpg -resize 50% \
-quality 88 \
-set filename:newsize '50_%t' '[filename:newsize].jpg';

Then, after inspecting the results, all that was left to do was to rename the 50_ prefixed files back to the original file name.

-John Havlik

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Updated:

Worldwide WordPress 5k 2012

Posted by in General

[wpt-activity]

Err, make that a 21.7k. Since I did not see a post about the World Wide WordPress 5k earlier this month, I had assumed it was going to be one of of those “one shot” initiatives. However, today I saw they just moved it to the end of April (to today). Due to this, the MSP WordPress user group did not get together for the WWP5k as we did last year. None-the-less I put in double digits worth of miles weekly again, so I’m going to count Saturday’s 13.4 mile run as my WWP5k run.

Saturday we had some sleet as we left for the run. Luckily, less than 5 minuets into the run we had run out of the rain/sleet and had about 11 very nice miles. During the last 2 miles the wind picked up and the sleet started again.

My goal for next year, other than not forgetting and organizing an run with the MSPWUG, is to get WP Trainer to a more usable state.

-John Havlik

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Cisco Valet Connector Constant Reboot

Posted by in General

A few Sunday mornings back, I was woken up by the dog, who was in a quite agitated state. The media center had been trying to come out of hibernation to check TV schedules and do the other miscellaneous stuff that brings it out of sleep. However, it kept rebooting instantly out of the BIOS. Every time the memory check passed, it would beep, annoying the dog, who passed the annoyance onto me.

Unplugging the Cisco Valet Connector allowed the media center to boot properly. Cool, well not really, as a WiFi adapter should not keep a computer from booting. The fact that the Valet Connector shows up as a USB flash drive before becoming a WiFi adapter seemed odd to be before. And, I’m placing part of the blame on that behavior for this constant rebooting. To resolve the issue, I removed USB flash drives from the boot list in the motherboard’s BIOS.

When the media center finally booted, I noticed another issue. The Valet forgot that it was supposed to be in WiFi adapter mode. This one was my fault. If you do not complete the device setup using the included easy setup software, the device may not remember its state after reboot. Awesome, right? After completing the setup within the included easy setup software I have not had either issue reappear for a week now.

-John Havlik

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