The Blog
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What 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…
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Get 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…
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Migrate 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…
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Configure wkhtmltopdf for Laravel Snappy on Homestead, Sail, Forge
Laravel Snappy depends on wkhtmltopdf, and the Composer wrappers are outdated. Here’s how to get set up with the latest version.
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Keep 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…
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Google’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…
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Semantic 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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Remove WordPress Actions with Object-Bound Callbacks
Often, it’s very simple to disable a filter or action in WordPress. Core’s adherence, merit notwithstanding, to working in the global namespace meant many plugins and themes followed suit. So unhooking a function was as simple as: But as PHP has matured, plugin and theme authors are more often using modern structures and practices, like…
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The Sterner Stuff Work-From-Home Starter Kit
Working from home is brand new for a lot of folks, and it’s full of quirks and challenges. Even for someone who’s worked from home or a flex office for a while, COVID-19 has caused me to re-evaluate my setup. To maximize your productivity, here are a few products you shouldn’t live without. But First……
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Video Conference Alternatives to Zoom
This article does not contain affiliate links In the midst of the COVID-19 outbreak, people have been flocking to Zoom for their business meetings and virtual happy hours. With that has come increased scrutiny of the video conference darling. Folks have found their privacy policy to be less than forthcoming about the data shipped back…
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