It’s very important that you know if your site goes down. In this post, I’ll show you how to create an uptime monitor for Ghost (or any other service). I’m happy to be hosting my site with Digital Ocean and am also glad they provide alerts for metrics such as CPU usage, Bandwidth, Disk Utilization, etc. However, […]

Password prompts really put a damper on automation. In this post, I want to show you how to automate the psql password so you can run Postgres commands in a scripting environment. So let’s create a script that: Here’s the script. Note that we are able to pass in the password=$psqlPassword parameter to the psql command and […]

It’s a brand new year with new opportunities. In this post, I want to share with you 5 tips for junior web developer growth in 2021. Quick Nav 5 Tips for Junior Web Developer Growth in 2021 1. Get crystal clear about your goals 2. Get out of the “learning bubble” 3. Build stuff from […]

If you are looking to add an ads.txt to a Ghost Blog on platforms such as Digital Ocean, there are few minor adjustments you must make. I’ll show you how to do it in this tutorial. What is an Ads.txt file? According to the docs, its an initiative to help ensure that your digital ad inventory […]

When setting custom Nameservers for GoDaddy domains, an IP Address is required for each. In this article, I’ll show you how to easily locate that IP Address. I recently moved my blog to Digital Ocean. My domain is with GoDaddy and when changing the Nameservers over to the three required by Digital Ocean, I was […]

In light of WordPress’s primary category feature, we sometimes just want to just retrieve that one primary category, not a list of all. In this post, I’ll show you how to get the primary category of a post only. First off, whether a post should have multiple categories or not is for another discussion. The […]

Where can I safely store an API Key in WordPress and not expose it to the public or in the code? In this post, I’ll show you two ways. Two ways to store an API key in WordPress: 1. In wp-config.php Define the API key in the wp-config.php file. For example: define( ‘API_KEY’, ‘ieifkasdfasdf939390’ ); […]

When people ask me about a good Genesis starter theme, I now answer exclusively with “the Genesis Sample theme…..with an added Sass & Gulp workflow.” I’ll share it with you in this post. I’ve been back and forth on Genesis starter themes over the years. I made one a while back with the Genesis Sample […]

The Slick Slider library is a solid option for displaying slideshows on your website and my go-to solution the majority of the time. In this post, I’ll show you how to set it up for your next project. Being a developer I personally hate slider plugins. In my opinion they give you so many options […]

Using WordPress transients to cache data can help to speed up your site’s performance significantly. But how do we use them? Let’s discuss it in this post. Before I took the software job I’m currently at, I underwent a number of interviews. In doing so, I had this question asked: “If you had multiple queries […]