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

Driving the (ve) Server at Media Temple

It’s been a few weeks now since Media Temple launched their new (ve) Server and I’ve been testing it out for a few days now. I’m actually hosting my blog there to experience some real traffic load and my first impressions are awesome! I started off with the simplest 512 MB server and transferred a few websites to the new platform. I’m not too used to the Ubuntu Linux...

WordPress Snippet: List Authors/Contributors

We were playing around with Brian (@bkmacdaddy) today on a WordPress blog with a few over 50 authors, then bumped into an issue where we had to output a list of all contributors. It’s quite easy at first sight, and functions such as wp_list_authors are quite good at it, but not good enough. The main issue was that the authors had to be paged and sorted by their names. Moreover, each entry...

Twitter Followers Count Snippet for WordPress

Here’s a short snippet to grab and display your twitter followers count in WordPress. You can use this anywhere, sidebar, posts, header, footer. We’ll be firing an anonymous call to the Twitter API for a user profile. This method does not require authentication, unless you’re trying to view a protected profile. To make this slightly easier I’ve used the JSON functions...

Zend Certification: PHP 5 Mock Exam Giveaway

Last Friday I had my Zend PHP 5 Certification Exam and guess what, I passed! Yeah, so now I officially am a Zend Certified Engineer. What does this mean? Well, I had a headache studying all the PHP 5 material, especially the design & PDO chapters, which I was not too familiar with. Was it worth the time and money? Yes. I’m not sure about the certificate itself, it’s not like...

Preparing for Zend PHP 5 Certification

I mentioned on Twitter a while ago that I’ll be taking the Zend PHP 5 Certification exam at the end of this month. Well, the time has come! Exam is tomorrow noon. I’m quite excited about it, cause with this startup thing I had no time to study at all! I did read the Study Guide by php|architect and it’s quite good, but outlines only some aspects on each topic. It doesn’t...

Introducing Retweet Anywhere for WordPress

Hey, guess what! I’ve just released a new WordPress plugin called Retweet Anywhere. It’s something I’ve been working on a few days, inspired by the previoulsy used Sociable and Tweetmeme plugins, allowing visitors to tweet my posts. What I didn’t like about those two is that Sociable simply redirects to twitter.com with a preset status, and Tweetmeme is not customizable...

Brand Your Tweets with Twitter Anywhere

What we’ve seen so far at Twitter @Anywhere is amazing! I’ve seen tonnes of websites implement Twitter functionality to ther websites without any hassle and it also seems to work well! Now that the documentation is being arranged, everything seems clear enough, this is yet another way of branded tweeting! Branded tweeting? Huh? Well, this is a topic covered quite sime time ago, when...

Setup Twitter @Anywhere for WordPress in Seconds!

That’s right, seconds! The twitter @Anywhere was introduced at SXSW conference and launched the dev tools a couple of days ago. It’s a simple javascript-driven set of tools that allows you to basically integrate Twitter functionality anywhere on your websites. Usage is as simple as loading a javascript file and launching a couple of js commands, which instantly give you the power of...

RIP Bit.ly? Twitter Will Launch Its Own Shortener

As mentioned on TechCrunch, Evan Willams at Chirp confirmed that Twitter will sooner or later launch its own URL shortener, probably called twee.tt or twt.tl (both owned by Twitter). Well, let’s just hope that they do a good job at this. I’m talking about the future functionality and the links riot going on for quite a while. It seems that more and more people and businesses are...

Custom XML-RPC Methods in WordPress

With more and more talk around WordPress 3.0 it seems that the system is gaining even more popularity than ever before due to it’s extensibility. Today I’d like to discuss a topic that might not be of much use to bloggers and basic websites, but is generally required in larger projects – XML-RPC. It’s not limited to WordPress 3.0, but as custom post types are on their way...