Roy Lindauer
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  • 2020

    I am exhausted. Anxious. Stressed. This year has been a real test and I am done with being tested. The planet spun on and will make another revolution around the sun. For that I am grateful. But go...
    (Dec 30 2020)
  • Welcome, again, to my development blog

    Hello and thank you for checking out my not-a-blog blog. I mostly share tips and how-to's about web development, Sysadmin/DevOps, and other technical/development things I have been doing web devel...
    (Dec 18 2019)
  • Doing that DevOps thing

    My first year at Blackbird has been good. My main goal in my first year was to migrate the monolithic system and infrastructure into something more scalable and reliable. Well this week was the wee...
    (Aug 2 2019)
  • Feeling Satisfied

    I had set out about 2 years ago to get some certifications for my own personal and professional growth, but life and things and other things got in the way (work? Factorio? excuses?) and I just nev...
    (Mar 17 2019)
  • Docker putting downloads behind a login wall

    In regards to issue https://github.com/docker/docker.github.io/issues/6910, Docker putting links to download Docker CE behind a login wall. The comment thread is long, and people are, in my opinion...
    (Dec 20 2018)
  • The Reality of Gutenberg & WordPress

    Gutenberg is happening. It is coming and it is coming soon. I am not thrilled. WordPress the CMSAutomattic have been trying to tell us for years that WordPress is more than a blogging platform, t...
    (Mar 26 2018)
  • Profiling and Debugging a PHP app with Xdebug and Docker

    I have started using an IDE again (PHPStorm) so that I could debug some applications and do some basic app profiling. I want to use Xdebug to profile my PHP apps. I am using Docker Compose on Windo...
    (Feb 14 2018)
  • WP Transients must be used responsibly

    We ran into an interesting issue with WooCommerce at work. First, here is the subject of the support request we got from our hosting provider: “The site is generating ~150MB/sec of transaction log...
    (Jan 29 2018)
  • Development on Windows

    It has been a few months since I got a new laptop with Windows 10. For the most part it has been pretty damn nice. The UI is pretty good, the native apps are not terrible, Cortana is actually usefu...
    (Jan 17 2018)
  • Order Posts via "Weighted Pseudo Randomness"

    A request we are getting more often is to show a list of posts, to elevate some of those posts above others, and to show the posts in a random order. Imagine a post type called "Sponsors". Sponsors...
    (Jul 25 2017)
  • What happened to empathy and compassion in the medical industry?

    My wife had some irregularities in her blood work so the Dr. had her take a test to see if she has thyroid cancer or not. This Dr. tells my wife that he will get back to her in 2 business days. 4 b...
    (Dec 21 2016)
  • Regular Expression of the day

    (?!(([1,2,3,4,5,6,8,9,0])\2{9}))(?!((1234567890|0987654321)))(((\+?\d{1,2}[\s.-])?\(?\d{3}\)?[\s.-]\d{3}[\s.-]\d{4})|(\d{10,}))Match generic US phone numbers. Ignore 1-9 repeating (ie: 4444444444, ...
    (Dec 20 2016)
  • Technical Documentation for a Web Development Project

    Working on a large web development project requires that you have clear direction and good technical documentation. The designer needs to understand the functional requirements and the data model i...
    (Oct 5 2016)
  • TLS Peer Verification w/PHP 5.6 and WordPress SMTP Email plugin

    We ran into an issue after upgrading from PHP 5.5 to 5.6. We were no longer able to send email via the awesome WordPress SMTP Email plugin. Turns out that PHP 5.6 introduced some enhancements to it...
    (Sep 22 2016)
  • Whitelist IPs in Nginx

    I want to whitelist my clients IP addresses (and my office IPs) to allow them to view a site, while the rest of the world will be redirected to another site, using Nginx. My Nginx server is behind ...
    (Jun 13 2016)
  • Capistrano tasks for Magento

    Custom tasks for Capistrano that I am using to help manage a Magento website. set :linked_files, %w{app/etc/local.xml .htaccess robots.txt} set :linked_dirs, %w{sitemap var media} namespace :mage...
    (May 17 2016)
  • Creating link tags with hreflang attributes in CraftCMS

    I want to preface this with the following; I think CraftCMS is a poor CMS. I dislike many things that it does and cannot recommend it as a professional CMS. Having said, that, I am working with it ...
    (May 6 2016)
  • Setting up Git HTTP Backend for local collaboration

    You want to share a topic branch with a colleague but do not want to push that branch upstream to Github/BitBucket/GitLab, etc. How do you do this? You could create a patch and email it. Or you cou...
    (Feb 9 2016)
  • Enable status for php-fpm

    Accessing the PHP-FPM Status screen is easy enough. First, enable pm.status in your php pool: pm.status_path = /statusThen add the following block to your Nginx vhost conf: location ~ ^/(stat...
    (Jun 8 2015)
  • My Pantheon + Jenkins Process

    Here is a rough outline of my Pantheon + Jenkins process. I like my code in BitBucket. I also like Pantheon (check them out). The Pantheon workflow is all about being the source of truth for your c...
    (May 26 2015)
  • A WordPress ajax handler for custom themes

    Something I have been noodling on is a better way to handle ajax requests in my custom themes. Seems to me that a relatively complex theme ends up with a lot of add_action calls for custom ajax han...
    (May 21 2015)
  • My VagrantFile

    This is the Vagrantfile I am using for my development box at home and work. It is determines how much ram is available and how I want to allocate, how many CPUs are available, and configures the VM...
    (May 19 2015)
  • Ohai Plugin for OpenVZ VMs to get public IP Address

    Media Temple uses the OpenVZ virtualization system and I have quite a few Media Temple servers under Chef management. The one thing that has made management difficult is that by default during a Ch...
    (Apr 2 2015)
  • What to do when your website is hacked/exploited

    So your website has been "hacked"? You load your website in your browser, and are redirected to some spammers website, or maybe you google'd yourself (naughty), and found a few thousand indexed pag...
    (Feb 19 2015)
  • Virtualbox Bug related to SendFile

    I have been doing more web development with Vagrant and VirtualBox. It's a nice way to keep my dev environment nearly the same as my production environments. Recently I was doing some front-end cod...
    (Sep 26 2014)
  • Setup Development Environment with Vagrant & Chef

    I use Chef to manage and provision new staging and production servers in our company. It takes a lot of the headache out of managing multiple servers and allows me to fire up new web & data servers...
    (Jul 13 2014)
  • Trying to Troubleshoot extremely high MySQL CPU Usage

    MySQL CPU usage was spiking upwards of 1000%. Load average was around 50-60. I could not SSH into the machine though, not immediately. Since I could not actually get into the machine I had it rest...
    (Jul 12 2014)
  • Securing Git repository from accidental exposure using Chef

    It was brought to my attention at the office that a few of our recently launched websites had publicly exposed .git repository information. Unscrupulous users could use the exposed data to pull dow...
    (Jul 10 2014)