As you may have heard, Automattic recently secured the rights to operate the sale and registration of .blog — a new top-level domain, which is currently in the Sunrise period, where trademark owners can apply. The Landrush period, where anyone can apply for their desired .blog domains, is scheduled for November 2nd, and public launch is expected on November 21st. However, a few select...
WordCamp Moscow 2016 Recap
WordCamp Moscow 2016 was held this weekend in the amazing Digital October Center. Fourteen speakers from Russia, Ukraine and Lithuania, two tracks with great content on design, programming, blogging, business and of course SEO. Huge props to Dmitry Mayorov for taking on the lead organizer role and making the best out of it. We had a little over 200 attendees this year, and the event was quite a...
What the Queries
I’ve never been a fan of IDEs, complex debugging tools with breakpoints, variable watch lists and all that fancy stuff. var_dump() and print_r() have always been my best friends. Recently I was playing around with the caching arguments in WP_Query, trying to combine that with update_meta_cache() while sticking wp_suspend_cache_addition() somewhere there in the middle, and it quickly became...
WordCamp Russia 2015 Recap
We did it. WordCamp Russia 2015 was held last weekend in the amazing Digital October Center in Moscow. Attendance didn’t change much from last year — we saw about 200 people in person, but a lot of them (~ 60%) were folks who never attended a WordCamp before. The attendees survey showed great results, pretty much in line with last year and with what we expected overall. The pizza was...
Capture the Flag / OTA 2015
This past weekend I participated in my first Capture the Flag challenge which was hosted by Matt Hamilton (Eriner) and other folks of the OTA Team. It was an epic 72 hours. We teamed up with my brother and took 5th place. During those 72 hours I learned a lot more than I knew about steganography, cryptography, filesystem superblocks, and even got to sharpen my math skills. I must admit I knew...
Color Options vs. Decisions in WordPress Themes
One feature I was particularly excited about in Twenty Fourteen is the “accent color” which lets you personalize your theme by changing the default green to whatever you like. Unfortunately the feature was removed in #26220, mainly due to the fact that it allowed users to make bad choices, like using a color with a bad contrast, rendering their website ugly and unusable1. I’ve...
An Alternative to @import in WordPress Child Themes
Using Child Themes in WordPress is a great way to modify an existing theme, however the CSS @import directive is slower than it has to be, so you should try and avoid it. Here’s why. If it takes 200ms to load the child theme’s stylesheet, and 200ms to load the parent theme’s CSS, a modern web browser should take approximately 200ms to load both of them, because modern browsers...
MegaFon Moscow: Privacy & Advertising
Funny thing happened today. My car insurance expired, so I called my insurance company (RESO) from my cellphone. Nobody answered my call, it was Friday evening after all, so I hung up and decided to call them on Monday. A few hours later, I received a text-message: For those of you who can’t read Russian, it’s an advert from INHELP, a different insurance company offering its services...
WordCamp Russia 2014
The second WordCamp in Russia was a success, with almost 200 attendees and a great lineup of 14 speakers from all over Russia and abroad, including Ukraine and even Germany. I’m not going to go into much planning details like I did last year. Everything was mostly the same, with the exception of having almost twice as many speakers, two tracks, pizza for lunch, a new logo (which everybody...
Stay Tuned for WordCamp Russia 2014
Last year we had a blast and this year we’re planning to have an even bigger one. WordCamp Russia 2014 will be held on August 9th in Moscow. We have a line up of 14 speakers ready to deliver some WordPress awesomeness in two simultaneous tracks, at the popular Digital October conference center in Moscow. Tickets are available at $20, which includes a full day of learning and networking...