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

How to Count Facebook Fans in PHP

Update: There’s an new easier way of retrieving the fans count using the Graph API, covered here: Counting Facebook Fans in PHP: The Graph API Way Not too tricky this one, but very handy as the social media world is developing extremely fast. It may not be too useful to publish the fan count of your facebook fan page if you’ve got less than a hundred or so, but as soon as you jump...

Extending Custom Post Types in WordPress 3.0

In a previous article about Custom Post Types in WordPress 3.0 I outlined one of the most exciting features coming up in 3.0 and I noticed that people have already started building websites upon these new features. It’s not a secret that I’m working on a project myself which involves 3.0 so just like everybody else, I can’t wait to see it being released!

CSS Tricks – Playing With Position: Relative

For some of you this post might be obvious, but I’ve been working with XHTML and CSS for years and haven’t figured out you could do such magic! We’ll be talking about the CSS Position property and it’s combinations with the Overflow property. Let’s talk about each of these properties individually first. The position property could have five different values...

Custom Post Types in WordPress 3.0

I know it’s too early to speak about WordPress 3.0, but I’ve been playing around with some of it’s enhancements the other week, and.. Well, this is a miracle, really. Remember all those plugins promising custom post types in versions prior to 3.0. Those that never get updated and show themselves glitchy sometimes, especially during upgrades? Well the time has come.

The Web Development Cycle Explained

If you’ve ever been to software development classes you probably already know about the software development cycle: Pre-alpha, Alpha, Beta, Release candidate (Gamma, Delta), Release to Marketing and finally, General Availability. Well it goes pretty much the same in the web development world, except that there are a few other parties involved in the whole process, and today, in the dynamic...

5 Really Useful Trac Reports

For those of you who are not familiar with the project management software called The Trac Project please proceed to the Trac Guide. I’ve been working with this project management tool for quite some time now and the latest upgrades are just awesome. I believe the solution for private projects’ RSS feeds has been found a few months ago somewhere here. The iCalendar issue remains, but...

Robots Are Doing Better Than Humans on Twitter

This is all about an experiment I started back in July 2009, called TwiBots. Initially it was supposed to be a simple 24/7 online tweep (Michael Davis) saying a bunch of stuff randomly. But then we (Michael and I hehe) started picking out certain topics, feeding content from certain RSS feeds, filtering all content by keywords and regular expressions. When the new Retweet API came along, I wrote...

Short Note About HTML Anchor Bookmarks

This is totally rediculous, but it’s a fact. Some version of Microsoft Internet Explorer do not handle empty anchors at all! Unlike Firefox, Safari and the rest, IE simply doesn’t see them, so anchors lead to nowhere (top of the page). This is just a note for you (and me) to keep your anchors filled with something, at least a whitespace character ;) <a...

Facebook-style Lightbox with jQuery and Facebox

I recently came across an awesome plugin for jQuery which is called Facebox. Facebox produces a clean lightbox that can be a container for popup images, text and basically any HTML layout as well as AJAX powered content. The problem with Facebox is the lightbox placement. The dialog itself is placed in the center of the page horizontally with a preset margin from the top, which looks good, but...

jQuery Cycle: Pager and pagerAnchorBuilder

One very awesome and useful plugin for jQuery is jQuery Cycle, which pretty much works out of the box, but browsing through the second part of the Intermediate Demos we’ve seen a click transition called Pager, which is somewhat tricky. Pager is nothing but a few links next to your cycling block with page numbers, which switch the cycle upon click. It’s very useful when you have to...