👋 I’m Derrick, and this is my WordPress Blarg.
I’m an Enterprise Engineer for WordPress VIP. I’ve been with Automattic/VIP since 2015, and enjoy it every day!
On this site I mostly post absolute stupid garbage. You have been warned.
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Stopping WordPress User Registration Spam
I’ve had a rash of user registration spam lately, and even though I’m sure the site is secure, it’s just very annoying. So I’ve whipped up a quick little hook that I’ve thrown in my mu-plugins to give me the ability to add email hostnames to a blocklist and disable user registration from them: There’s…
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Supercharge Your Clipboard with a Shell Function for iTerm2
Well, I’ve been playing with ChatGPT more, and I had ChatGPT (GPT-4) write this blog post for me. I told it that I was going to give it some of my blog posts to determine my writing style, and to have it write me a blog post about this bash function. It’s …. meh ……
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More Garbage Sysadmin: Reboot Linux Server on Kernel Panic
Just like restarting a server when the memory is low, I’ve had a recent problem with kernel panics on my Raspberry Pi, and I’ve found a terrible solution to fix it: Just reboot. Setting the /proc/sys/kernel/panic file contents to a non-zero integer will reboot the server on kernel panic after that many seconds. Because I’m…
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Gathering database performance with WP-CLI
Recently at work, my team was asked to help gather data about database server performance before and after an upgrade. To help with this, we collected a number of heavy database pages on some WordPress sites, dumped every query running to generate the page, and grabbed them to profile. I whipped up this quick and…
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Get First Date of Week in Google Sheets, When the Week of the Year is Related to the Row Number
*phew* what a title For a recent project, I wanted to set up a Google Sheet that tracked something daily/weekly. I wanted one column to show the starting day of the week to help keep me on track, and I ended up with this: I used ChatGPT to help me make the formula to determine…
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Command Timing in ZSH
I’ve had a few snippets in my .zshrc file for a while now that will output how long a command takes to process. First off, I’d like to say that I did not come up with this idea, and I didn’t really write the code. I’ve snipped it from somewhere and modified it over time,…
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Limiting Featured Image Dimensions in WordPress
As a follow up to my last post about limiting file sizes during uploads, I had to come back to the problem with limiting image sizes for featured images. Not bytes this time, but pixel dimensions. Still being a bit of a block editor newb, this was an interesting challenge for me, and I was…
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Half Baked Idea: Limiting WordPress Image Upload Sizes
If you want to be able to limit images (or any attachments) from being uploaded into the media library if they are too large, you can use the wp_handle_upload_prefilter filter to do this. Below is a really basic example I whipped up in a few minutes that I shared with a customer not too long…
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Dall-E 2 Outpainting Experiment
OpenAI recently introduced a new feature called Outpainting to Dall-E 2 This lets you easily expand your image without manual labor intensive hacks. With this, I decided to do a quick run through to see what’s on the other side of Bliss Now, I probably could have gotten something a lot better if I’d taken…
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