WordCamp Moscow 2016

I’m Konstantin Kovshenin, a WordPress core contributor, ex-Automattician, public speaker and consultant, enjoying life in Moscow. I blog about tech, WordPress and DevOps.

I do code review, training and consulting on WordPress performance, scaling and security. Schedule a call if you’re interested.

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Recent Blog Posts

Ubuntu 11.10 Wireless on Sony Vaio with RT3090

Updated my Sony Vaio VPCM12M1R netbook to Ubuntu 11.10. The update went quite smooth although wireless immediately stopped working. Well it didn’t quite work with Ubuntu 10.10 either but the RT3090 package fixed it last time. Luckily I didn’t remove the package and was lucky to get things working on 11.10 simply by: sudo dpkg -i rt3090-dkms_2.3.1.3-0ubuntu0~ppa1_all.deb And obviously...

WordPress 3.3 Release Candidate 2

Sweet! WordPress 3.3 Release Candidate 2 is here and as Andrew Nacin pointed out they’re “really close to a final release.” To find out what’s new in 3.3, visit the About page after installing the release candidate. Good luck and make sure your themes and plugins throw no errors!

My Twitter Account has finally been unsuspended

My Twitter Account has finally been unsuspended this morning. I wrote earlier that my account was suspended for no reason without any notification emails from Twitter support. The funny thing is even though it was unsuspended today, I got no response to the two tickets I filed so I don’t even know the reason why it was suspended in the first place. Oh well…

Sphinx in WordPress

You probably will agree with me that the standard WordPress search doesn’t even smell like search. I mean querying the database with the simplest LIKE query and sorting the results by date isn’t really a search. I’ve been keeping my eye out on Sphinx — an open source search server that works well with MySQL databases and I’ve finally had a chance to set it up for...

VirtualBox and NFS for Web Development

If you’re using VirtualBox for web development and sync data between the host and guest VMs using folder sharing via Guest Additions, you might have noticed that VirtualBox is not too good ad syncing files and some of them tend to get lost too. Here’s a good tutorial on Setting Up NFS in Ubuntu which turned out to be a great alternative, works crazy fast, no permissions issue, syncs...

WordPress, Drupal and Joomla Awareness in Russia

WordPress awareness (search volume) in Russia did not change much over the last year. Joomla’s still strong but dropping steadily, which seems to be a good sign. Drupal’s worse but at least they’re doing the DrupalCon here. So we all have to do something about it to change the picture next year. Any ideas?

Custom Post Types Archives in WordPress

Did you know that register_post_type has got a has_archive argument which can be set to a string? In which case it will use that string as a slug for the archives and generate the proper rewrite rules for you. Don’t forget to visit your permalinks settings page though to flush rules when making changes.

Twitter Account Suspended

Here’s a Thanksgiving surprise I got from Twitter today. Seriously, I’ve got a dozen accounts for brands and experiments I run using the Twitter API, but never on my own and funny thing, the rest are fine but mine’s suspended, and no single e-mail from them in my inbox! Contacting Twitter support, let’s see what they have to say.
Happy Thanksgiving!

Varnish and Preview Posts in WordPress

I wrote earlier that I started playing around with Varnish here on my site and that post has a little snippet that strips all incoming and outgoing cookies (except the admin of course.) Today I stumbled on a problem where I had no permission to preview a post I was drafting in WordPress and they all turned 404’s when I tried to. I first thought Varnish was stripping out the preview query...