Posts by Ethan Clevenger
Configure Klaviyo Back-in-Stock Notifications for Shopify Dawn
Klaviyo is an email marketing platform with a strong Shopify integration. Of the many features it offers, including personalized recommended products in email campaigns and customer behavior tracking, it can be set up to allow customers to sign up to know when a product on your Shopify store is coming back in stock. Out of…
Read MoreWhat WordPress Acquisitions Mean for Plugin Quality
In September’s WordPress plugin acquisition news, StellarWP acquired LearnDash, the de facto learning management system plugin for WordPress. We don’t do a lot of LMS work over here at Sterner Stuff, so, you know, whatever. But if you receive any kind of business-minded WordPress newsletter or are otherwise plugged into “the business of WordPress”, you…
Read MoreGet a List of All Your Instagram Followers for Free
A great way to organically increase your Instagram followers is to run promotions specifically for followers. We recently organized a promotion for Porterhouse Clothing where followers were automatically entered in a gift card drawing, plus an extra entry for tagging friends in comments. Of course, this meant pulling a list of followers, which Instagram doesn’t…
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WooCommerce Foreign Key Errors and MySQL Engines
Here at Sterner Stuff, we don’t like throwing away existing websites and content. We call that stuff “equity”, and no one wants to throw away equity. When possible, we’ll repurpose as much of a WordPress site as possible when implementing a new design, features, etc. So while it may seem like a brand new site,…
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Configuring WP fail2ban Behind Cloudflare
If your WordPress website is proxied behind Cloudflare, the IP address reported to your server isn’t the actual IP address of the original request. It’s a Cloudflare IP. Most of the time, this doesn’t matter, but if you’re using WP fail2ban, this causes issues. The Problem By default, fail2ban in combination with WP fail2ban works…
Read MoreMigrate from WP User Avatar to JJJ’s WP User Avatars
WP User Avatar, now commandeered by ProfilePress, is significantly more bloated than it once was. There are a variety of alternatives to turn to if you want to replace it, but I’ve chosen (and recommend) WP User Avatars, maintained by WordPress core contributor John James Jacoby. The migration here is pretty simple. WP User Avatar…
Read MoreConfigure wkhtmltopdf for Laravel Snappy on Homestead, Sail, Forge
If you’re generating PDFs from HTML in the Laravel world, you’re likely using something like Snappy, wrapped conveniently in a service provider by barryvdh/laravel-snappy. Snappy depends on the wkhtmltopdf binary to function. Per the documentation, this binary is conveniently available via Composer: But that package hasn’t been updated in 4+ years, meaning the binary is…
Read MoreKeep MySQL Databases During Laravel Homestead Upgrade
This question has been documented about a million places around the internet with a variety of convoluted answers. How can we upgrade Laravel Homestead without losing our MySQL databases? Instead of writing your own mysqldump commands, or copying and pasting one from an internet stranger, there’s actually functionality for this built right into Homestead. If…
Read MoreGoogle’s Core Web Vitals and Organic Search Ranking
Google is rolling out a new set of metrics designed to evaluate the performance of websites across the internet. How your site performs, according to these metrics, will directly impact your website’s organic search engine results page (SERP) ranking – that is, how close to the top of Google you are. Site speed has always…
Read MoreSemantic Versioning for WordPress
One of the biggest struggles facing both the maintainers of WordPress and individuals tasked with maintaining WordPress sites is updates. Running updates often gets ignored by non-technical users afraid of breaking things, and the WordPress core team is doing everything they can to mitigate the security risks involved with not updating. If you don’t install…
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