WordCamp Moscow 2016

I’m Konstantin Kovshenin, a WordPress core contributor, ex-Automattician, public speaker and consultant, enjoying life in the rainy UK. 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

A Proposal to Solve the Bilingual Tweeting Problem

I was cleaning my Twitter account last week from unwanted peeps in the following list. It is really damn hard to keep up with a 1000 tweeps tweeting over 20 messages every second, only one of which could be valuable. So after I cleaned it up, I actually got a better stream from my friends, more tweets in Russian, and more personal tweets, rather than titles and links to blog posts via twitterfeed...

Snippet: Nofollow for Tag Cloud in WordPress

Tag clouds are good, but in a previous post called WordPress & Google Analytics: Tracking Your Tag Cloud I admitted that they’re not very useful, and especially for search engines — which is the topic I’ll discuss today. I’m not an SEO junkie or anything but I do have some knowledge of the basic rules, one of which is avoid duplicate content. Now fire up your blog...

WordPress & Google Analytics: Tracking Your Tag Cloud

I was doing some minor changes to my WordPress theme this week (have you noticed any?) — some SEO improvements and an easter egg ;) Anyhow, I came across my super duper tag cloud, which is one of the things I like most about my website, seriously. I heard enough people, mostly designers and UI experts say that the tag cloud is of no use! But I really really like it, which is why I decided...

Disable HTTP Access to .git Without .htaccess

Long story short. If you’re working with Git repositories you’ll notice they have a .git directory and sometimes a .gitignore. Git makes it quite convenient to deploy applications to production servers directly using git clone instead of git archive, but that might leave a possible security issue on your production server — the .git directory might be accessible. There are...

How To Create a Remote Shared Git Repository

So Github doesn’t work for you? This article is about setting up a private, remote and shared Git repository for you and your team. I’m using Ubuntu 10.10 and 10.04, as well as Fedora Linux (assuming you replace apt-get with yum), anyhow this should work on all other distros with minor modifications. I’m not going to tell you what Git is, and I’m not going to teach you how...

qrTip: A jQuery Plugin to Display QR Codes for Links

Hey. I was doing some experimenting earlier this week with the new Google URL Shortener API and then found out that they can display QR codes for their shortened links using Google’s Chart API which is awesome. So today, I present to you qrTip — a jQuery plugin that can display QR tooltips for links on your page: Check out the qrTip Demo and hover over the links to feel the taste of...

Using Google's URL Shortener (goo.gl) in WordPress

The Google URL Shortener API has been released this week so I came up with a short snippet that generates short goo.gl URLs. The script is quite simple, you can paste it in your theme’s functions.php file or create a plugin out of it, so without further ado: function googl_shortlink($url, $post_id) { global $post; if (!$post_id && $post) $post_id = $post->ID; if ($post...

Review: Nexus One, Android & Software Freedom

The first time I mentioned I wanted a Nexus One phone was on January 21st, 2010. That’s almost a year ago and I was ready to trade in my iPhone for a Google phone. This Christmas I made myself a present and got that Nexus One from some “not so legal” Internet store here in Moscow. I guess they’re (Nexus One & Nexus S) not yet or ever will be certified for the Russian...

How to Track Your Social Links with Google Analytics

Quick and easy one. See the links to my social profiles on your right? I’ve been displaying those for years, but I never knew if they were ever clicked on, and if they were, which ones are the most popular ones? Perhaps I have to get rid of some of them, and make other brighter to get more attention? Or maybe simply switch places and keep the most relevant ones on the top left? After...

Happy 2011: In 10+ Different Programming Languages

The end of the year 2010 is near so I’ve prepared this post for all you coders, developers and other geeks. You know when you build applications (especially web applications) you often leave a copyright notice on every page saying “Copyright 2010, All Rights Reserved” or whatever? Right, but what developers tend to forget is that time passes by and that they have to go back and...