WordCamp Moscow 2016

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

Quick Flickr Widget and the Flickr API Services

Hope you remember the Quick Flickr Widget plugin for WordPress. Well, since version 1.2 I’ve changed the way it works. Prior to 1.2, as Donncha suggested in his Flickr plugin, I used a public Flickr RSS feed to display the items, using WordPress’ RSS functions to move around the feed. Anyways I thought that I couldn’t take the plugin far enough, so I decided to use the Flickr...

The WP-Custom plugin. What's it all about?

You heard the news! My WP-Custom plugin got WordPress.org hosting approval a few days ago. So I finally uploaded it into their plugins repo and already got some positive feedback on Twitter and IM. Anyways, some still can’t figure out what I made the plugin for, so here’s some explenation. I assume that you’ve read the plugin description on the wordpress.org website or the...

Javascript: Element Suicide

A short tip on js suicide. Suicide? Well.. I mean have an element remove itself. I came across this a while ago: a ‘read more’ link which should set the display property of an element to ‘block’ and remove itself completely from the DOM. Plain javascript, no frameworks. Here’s what I came to: this.parentNode.removeChild(this); It doesn’t require an id, name or...

Give WordPress the iPhone Look: wpTouch Plugin

I don’t want to talk much about the wpTouch plugin, cause it’s all well documented over here. I’m writing this post for those of you who are afraid to make the first step to the terrific handheld view. Yeah, iPhone has got the Safari browser which can show my page just as it is shown on PC, and it even executes javascript! That’s the main reason why people don’t...

WordPress Junkies: Blogging via iPhone

I wrote about offline blogging with Windows Live Writer some time ago, and now I realized that it’s not that fun! Alright, I have two good news. The first one’s that I received approval for my second wordpress plugin (Related External Links) to be hosted at the official WordPress Plugin Directory. I commited the first beta a few minutes ago so go ahead and vote it up: Related External...

Quick Flickr Widget: Plugin update!

Hey I got some great news about my first wordpress plugin called Quick Flickr Widget. I applied to the WordPress Plugin Directory and guess what! I got hosted! They sent me an e-mail with all the necessary links. I quickly set up a valid readme file and uploaded everything to their plugins repository under version 1.0b. The plugin appeared in the directory in about 10 minutes, but there was no...

WordPress Plugins: It’s Flickr Time!

Hi. I wrote a while ago on Twitter about starting the development of a WordPress plugin for displaying some Flickr photos in your sidebar. I finally finished coding and debugging the first part. It’s called Quick Flickr Widget. Here are some features: Easy to setup Up to 10 Flickr photos in your sidebar Fully customizable widget (editable before_widget, after_widget, before_item...

WordPress: Theme Design Tips & Tricks

Greets. If you never did a WordPress theme before, then this post is for you. As you may already know, I released my very first wordpress theme a couple of weeks ago and it’s the one you’re looking at right now (unless you’re reading this from last year’s archive). I can’t say it was very easy developing it, but I noted down some tips that would make the process...

Benchmarking: Your Web Hosting is Not That Perfect

Today I realized that the VPS I’m renting for $20/mo is not as good as it seemed at first. Ever thought about high loads? Okay, this may sound like some DDoS hacking tools, but no! 100 requests with 10 simultaneous made my virtual private server think for ~ 1,5 minutes. Jeez! It took me quite some time to find good software for running some load tests on my webserver, linux has some good...

A Reason to Love TwitScoop

As many of you have already heard, Gmail servers have been down lately and Twitter was there to prove this. Instead of asking “Is it me or is Gmail offline” you could have just looked at the TwitScoop realtime cloud and remain silent, or perhaps tweet some “Experiencing problems with #gmail too…” just to keep up the trends. Wonderful, huh? I’m also glad that...