Insights - Ryan Sechrest

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Insights

Objectives and how they were achieved.

GitHub's Octocat standing on the trackpad of a MacBook.

How to enable WordPress to update your custom plugin hosted on GitHub

Most of my WordPress plugins are exclusive to a specific site, but every now and then I'll create a utility plugin that gets installed on multiple sites. Then, whenever I update that plugin, I have to remember which sites have it installed, and manually push that update to

Four different styles of blank gift tags.

Hide specific posts from homepage in Ghost

I recently became a dad and plan to occasionally write about my experience. That said, since my blog is primarily about technology, I don't want those posts surfacing on the homepage, because they're not written for my target audience. The first step is to group all

Woman, with her back to a river, studying a paper map.

Include year and month in Ghost blog post permalinks

This is especially useful if you migrated your posts from WordPress to Ghost and want to keep most of your blog post URLs the same. If you go to Settings > Labs, click on Download current routes.yaml within the Beta Features > Routes section at the very bottom. Open

Characters from Toy Story facing away to send a child off to school.

Disable infinite scroll in Ghost's Casper theme

The team at Ghost added the ability to disable the infinite scroll in the latest version of the Casper theme (5.4.2). If you want to disable it, go to Settings > Site injection and paste the following code snippet into Site Header: <script> document.documentElement.classList.

Typewriter with a piece of paper on which it says "Artificial Intelligence".

How to use PHP autoloader to require files containing namespaced classes

If you're building an object-oriented PHP application that's larger than a handful of files, it can be cumbersome to require them one by one. On top of that, you have to manually keep adding your new files. And if you have classes relying on other classes,

Old and rusty car with the hood open.

Install and configure Xdebug on your M1 Mac to debug PHP applications with Valet and PhpStorm

Xdebug allows you to set breakpoints in your PHP application. When you run that application, the execution will stop at each breakpoint you defined, providing you with an opportunity to inspect the state of your application, including things like which variables are defined, what value they contain, and a stack

White bunny sitting on pebbles next to a patch of grass.

Add custom bash autocomplete function to quickly move into code projects

I keep my projects in a Projects directory on my Mac. It's also not unusual for me to switch back and forth between projects throughout the day. To do that, I have a couple different options: 1. cd ~/Projects/dashboard 2. cd ../../dashboard Either I type a few

Paper figure in front of a board of PHP code.

Develop and run PHP applications like WordPress and Laravel on your Mac

I've determined that this stack is my preferred environment to develop and run PHP applications, like WordPress and Laravel, on my MacBook. It's less ambiguous than tools that do everything for me, so I have a bit more control and flexibility, and I'm able

Five telephone booths next to each other at night.

How to set up a simple contact form on your Ghost blog using Basin

I was looking for the simplest way to set up a contact form on my Ghost blog and I'm happy to report that I found one. If you're looking for a sneak peek on what we're going to build, take a look at my

Open MacBook with multiple hands interacting with keyboard and mouse.

How to track video plays in Ghost with Plausible

Plausible comes with the perfect number of metrics out of the box, but if you need a little more, you can track custom goals, such as outbound clicks or file downloads, by adjusting the script embed and including those goals within your site settings. Now, for additional custom event goals,

Close up of Terminal screen showing sudo command.

How to install Ghost alongside CyberPanel on Ubuntu 20.04 without Docker

If you have a Ubuntu server with CyberPanel installed, and want to install a Ghost blog on that same server, here are step by step directions on how to do that. The latest version of Ghost (5.x) encourages (and soon requires) MySQL 8. If your CyberPanel server has MariaDB

Arial view of a road with streaks of headlights and tail lights.

Insights Featured

How to set an animated background in Microsoft Teams without third-party software

When you try to add a new background to Microsoft Teams, the tooltip reminds you that it will only accept file types jpeg, jpg, png and bmp. Sure enough, when you browse for a new background, anything other than image file types are grayed out and can't be

Nine empty sticky notes stuck to the wall.

Enable auto index on website hosted on Ubuntu with CyberPanel and OpenLiteSpeed

I have a server at DigitalOcean with Ubuntu, CyberPanel, and OpenLiteSpeed, and wanted one of my websites to display an auto index of all the files uploaded to it. There is a default.php script in /usr/local/lsws/share/autoindex that simulates Apache’s auto index, which suffices for

Screenshot of GitLab repository.

Use Apache instead of built-in Nginx in GitLab CE

I installed GitLab CE using the Omnibus package on a new CentOS 6 server. Since I had nothing else on the server at that time, everything GitLab setup and configured was sufficient. Later, however, I wanted to setup additional sites on the server using Apache, but now port 80 was

Spider web strung across grass leaves.

Set up Mailtrap with WordPress

Mailtrap is a service that captures all mail sent by your site and prevents it from arriving at the intended recipient. It’s really useful for testing and debugging mail without having to write manual checks to ensure your users don’t get spammed with tests. Setting up Mailtrap with

Wooden anchor with a string on a piece of cloth.

YAML and PHP: Examples of arrays and anchors

I recently had to get my feet wet with YAML, so I’ll briefly explain how to get it up and running on your server, show some examples of how to represent multidimensional associative and indexed arrays, and lastly, how to utilize anchors, which is my favorite feature so far.

Yellow submarine docked above water.

How to update and deploy WordPress as a Git submodule

WordPress 3.8.2, a security release, came out yesterday. Now, if you’re already on WordPress 3.8, your WordPress installation will most likely automatically update, but if you are using Git to manage WordPress as a submodule, and have auto-update disabled, you have to do that manually. That

Birds eye view of congested highway intersection.

Rewrite rule to bulk redirect domains using Apache’s RewriteMap

A component of the server migration I’m currently working on is to move all of the existing virtual host files. Unfortunately, they’re not all consistently setup, which makes them difficult to overview, and from past experience, difficult to manage. There is also no easy way to tell which

16GB SD card on a red background.

Increase space on fixed VirtualBox VDI disk containing Windows 7 on Mac

I use VirtualBox on my Mac to have other operating systems at my disposal. One of my appliances contains a copy of Windows 7 with a fixed, 25GB disk. I’ve run out space and was looking for an easy way to increase it. I came across the modifyhd command,

Number of perfectly-aligned sticky notes stuck on a table.

Managing and organizing Apache virtual host files

I’m in the midst of building new servers, inventorying the existing ones, and creating a migration plan to move over anything that needs to make it over. This is the perfect time to look at the big picture and assess whether everything is implemented in the best way possible.

Wall with graffiti and letters PUSH.

Git post-receive hook to deploy WordPress and plugins as submodules

In a previous blog post I discussed how best to manage file and folder permissions when deploying with Git, but today I’ll show a specific example of what that post-receive hook might look like for a WordPress project that uses submodules. I have three servers that I can deploy

Several metal buckets in different sizes.

Accessing Amazon S3 buckets via Transmit

I will describe the steps for creating access keys, a S3 bucket, and setup Transmit to connect to your S3 bucket. In addition, I’ve collected a few final notes that may help you get up and running with whatever your end goal might be. Create Access Keys in AWS

Octocat and a baby Groot looking over a newspaper.

Bash shell prompt dissected: Display Git branch name and status in color

I received a snippet of code from my good friend Jason today. It goes into your .bash_profile and what it does is add two pieces of information to your Bash shell prompt when you’re in a Git working directory. With it, you’ll be able to tell: 1.

Keyboard buttons spread around an open lock.

Control server access: Prompt for credentials (basic auth) on approved networks, allow access to itself, and deny everyone else

To get a site feature from development to production, it goes through four servers: 1. Development 2. Quality Assurance (QA) 3. Staging 4. Production Except for the development server, which is localhost, there are times people, other than developers, need access to view a particular site on the QA or

Stacked crates of SPAM containers.

Prevent contact form spam in WordPress with Contact Form 7 and Akismet

If you’re running WordPress and have a contact form on your website, there’s a good chance you’re using Contact Form 7. You can get away with using it as-is for a while, but as time goes on, spambots begin to find their way into your inbox. At