Writing

Restic is a backup solution for Linux and other systems. I'm using it for automated backups to an external drive, for now. Will also add an offsite solution soon. For now, I'm mostly relying on Dropbox and GitHub. Install Restic I downlo...

The saying 'to paint the devil on the wall' is a German saying that's often used to tell people they're being too pessimistic. When I first heard it, it struck me as the Stoic idea for removing fear by contemplating the worst case, Preme...

Hacking the Query Loop

Dusty Candland | Mon Jun 03 2024 | wordpress, queryloop, wpsupporthq

I've been loving building sites with the block editor and more recently sites with full site editing (FSE).

One thing I've run into a few times is the need to hack the Query Loop block with some additional filtering and sorting.

Adding Sitepress to Rails

Dusty Candland | Thu Apr 11 2024 | rails, sitepress, seo

I've been using Proofreader.io and thought it's about time I fixed some of the issues that Proofreader is designed to surface. Like SEO & social meta tags, sitemaps, robots.txt. I choose Sitepress to handle the content side of things...

Had two attacks this week on different WordPress sites. One seems like a DDoS and the other an enumeration attack. Fail2Ban stopped both by quickly adding new jails.

Needed to migrate a Weebly site to WordPress. You can export all the web pages and images, but not the blog content. This script exports into a WordPress XML file that can be imported.

I'm using Dokku for my side projects and needed to make sure I had database backups. My Dokku instance is on DigitalOcean, so I wanted the backups to be there too.

I took a look at Go and HTMX using a web generation tool, Gowebly.

A next-generation CLI tool for building amazing web apps. Go, htmx & hyperscript, modern CSS frameworks!

How we implemented zero downtime deploys to increase team productivity

We had moved our API out of Rails into a Clojure service. The service was running great, but deploys were a pain. We couldn't have downtime when deploying; so we were taking servers offline, updating them, and then bringing them back online. Using the typical rolling deployment pattern.

That worked, but it was slow and took a lot of manual time. Being slow meant longer times to fix bugs. Taking a lot of manual time meant wasted time and a hesitancy to release often. Both are bad for the team and the business.

I'm using the Ghost modern publishing platform for my daily newsletter. It has a great UI, email support, and it's self hosted. I'm using Dokku for the hosting and Sqlite for the DB.

Very early in my career, I was written up for a JavaScript bug. I don't remember what bug, but I remember the analogy in the write-up. It bothered me for a long while. The analogy was basically: You drive to work every day and don't get...

I know, 10x engineer is click bait-y...

A list of resources for AI and LLM.

I've used the dokku-update app in the past, but version 0.30.0 has a breaking change, so I needed to upgrade to 0.29.x first. It doesn't look like dokku-update app doesn't support specific versions. Here's what I did to upgrade manually.

I'm starting to experiment with AI on Route285 and need a vector database. Since I'm already using Postgres and Dokku, I'm adding pgvector. Pgvector isn't installed by the main Postgres images.

I've ran into this a couple of times and it's taken forever to figure out! I don't know how I fixed it before, but this is how I fixed it this time.

I recently implemented verifying checksums in CommandWP and found some interesting results. 65% of sites had checksums that didn't verify! Here's a look at what I found. What changed? wp-admin/.rnd - Random seed files left over from som...

Bridgetown is a Ruby based static site generator. Being Ruby is awesome already, but with the new dynamic routes feature and support for Turbo it could be a really powerful site builder. Static for most things, and dynamic content provided by Turbo!

Searching and replacing text is easier with modern CLI tools. I'll show you how to use ripgrep and sd to search and replace text in files.

SMTP Set Up For Hosting Servers

Dusty Candland | Thu Feb 16 2023 | postfix, hostname, hosting

Notes for setting up SMTP for sending mail from hosting servers.

It's time to create a database for Route285. Up until now, I've been using Markdown and JSON files to manage the data for the site.

After looking at a few options, I settled on Directus. In thier words:

Find & fix trailing whitespace in files. grep -l $'[ \t]$' -r app/views | xargs -L 1 ex +'%s/\s\+$//g' -scx

The Thing About Pricing

Dusty Candland | Fri Sep 23 2022 | commandwp

Pricing is one of the things I've been struggling with on CommandWP. I want a simple plan that offers customers a lot of value. I want to offer pricing that I'd personally want to use.

While I figure that out, I've left pricing off the site, hoping to find early adopters to help me figure out pricing later. It seems most people don't want to invest time in something without having an idea of what the costs might be going forward. I'd want the same.

Here are some of my thoughts about pricing and where I ended up. CommandWP now has pricing!

Optimizing Development Processes for Business Value

Dusty Candland | Mon Sep 12 2022 | development, process

The point of software development is to deliver custom value as quickly as possible. At least development in the context of a business.

While teams should be self-managing, they should also strive to create value. These are principles for development I've seen increase productivity.

If Not a Roadmap, Then What?

Dusty Candland | Thu Aug 25 2022 | development, leadership, process

I've been wrestling with this question. Roadmap are so integrated in development processes that it's hard to think about processes without them.