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

Behold! Technical Support for WordPress

I got a response from the WordPress Plugin Directory today. Positive! They approved the new plugin’s home so I officialy let the plugin go public this morning. Of course I set up a page on my blog with the complete description, screenshots, feedback section (feature requests are welcome). Check it out – Technical Support for WordPress! Thank you for your support and voting at...

Plugin Development: Technical Support for WordPress

So, you’re a freelancer and you make WordPress powered websites for your clients, cool. Now how many times have you experienced them calling, emailing, texting, tweeting you asking for a core upgrade, plugin upgrade, theme fix or whatever? Well I’ve been experiencing that quite a lot, and that’s a reason to charge an extra monthly fee for support. And with this plugin …...

WordPress: Extending the Contact Form 7 Plugin

There are tonnes of good plugins for displaying contact forms on your WordPress blog, even a simple comment form without displaying the comments would do just fine, but let’s speak about one called Contact Form 7 written by Takayuki Miyoshi. I don’t think there’s a reason behind the number 7, perhaps it meant the year 2007, when Takayuki published the first version of his plugin...

From MySQL GUI Tools to MySQL Workbench

I bet that some of you still work with phpMyAdmin and there are plenty of good reasons for that. Perhaps the main reason would be its mobility. Being run by a web server, phpMyAdmin is accessible from anywhere, without installing any extra software, even on the mobiles phones. And the second reason is of course security – most web hosting providers restrict external access to MySQL servers...

Twitter Robot in PHP: Twibots Draft

As I promised quite some time ago, I’m putting out a draft of the Twitter Robot I wrote. Make sure you read Create Your Own Automated Twitter Robot in PHP before going on. The current functionality is as follows: Tweets around the clock Tweets from RSS feeds, supporting prefix and postfix text (for adding hashtags) Retweet via the Twitter Search API and build conversation lists Shoot random...

Posterous vs. Tumblr

I’ve seen a lot of people using Posterous and Tumblr for quite some time, and most of them seem happy enough with the level of customization which is available at both services. I decided to give it a go a few days ago and here’s a short revision of what I’ve been through. I started out with Posterous. It looked great, the standard theme suited me best, there weren’t any...

E-Commerce: Google Checkout Store Gadget

Remember those great offers from web design and development agencies? E-commerce website from $999! Well I believe their time is gone, and once more, Google is taking the lead. Google Checkout has been introduced quite some time ago, but here’s what there’ up to these days – Google Checkout Store Gadget. And this looks really fabulous! You can create your own online store in...

Amazon Web Services: EC2 in North California

January is going crazy for me down here in Moscow, lot’s of stuff happening, loads of work. No time to tweet, not time to blog. As I mentioned in my earlier post, I quit my job at GSL and now working at a new local startup. I’ll make sure to announce it as soon as the website is alright, so stay tuned ;) Anyways, as I wrote back in December, I’m moving all my stuff to the new...

Phew.. Party Time is Over. Welcome to 2010!

Hey there! Hope you all had a good rest and a fab time during your holidays. As you might have guessed, I did. I celebrated New Year in Italy! It was a 7-day stay at Rimini, from where we travelled to Venice, Florence and Rome. The New Year party was awesome, although the rain has probably ruined it for some of us. The good news is that we didn’t catch a cold ;) We ate a lot of pizza and...

Amazon Web Services: Moving to a New Region

I wrote about Optimizing Your Amazon Web Services Costs back in November, where I mentioned some of the upsides of Reserved Instances at Amazon, but haven’t mentioned any downsides, and here we are. Two weeks later Amazon announced the Northern California Region opening. I thought it wouldn’t differ from the Virginia data center, but still decided to give it a shot for a few hours. I...