Sep 26

Vladimir Lasky to Present Talk “Make WordPress Fly With Virtual Server Hosting” at WordCamp Sydney 2014

News and Announcements No Comments »

Our Lead Developer Vladimir Lasky will be presenting the talk “Make WordPress Fly With Virtual Server Hosting” at WordCamp Sydney 2014, to be held on the weekend of September 27 & 28 at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) City Campus.

His talk advocates the benefits of moving a WordPress site from shared hosting to Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting with information on:

  • How shared hosting environments limit the performance of a WordPress site
  • How VPS environments operate
  • Why pure SSD storage on a VPS is essential for good performance
  • The limitations and drawbacks of page caching, object caching and minifying plugins
  • Why all-in-one hosting control panels are evil
  • How PHP Opcode caching is the only true way to make WordPress run faster
  • How MySQL query caching dramatically speeds up communication between WordPress and MySQL
  • Tips on securing your VPS

Vlad presents an WordPress VPS-hosting approach designed to:

  • Not be radically different from a commonly-configured LAMP software environment
  • Avoid cache invalidation-related problems and minimise plugin incompatibilities
  • Ensure that everyone sees the most current state of your WordPress site
  • Ensure that logged in users and those working in the WordPress admin backend will also experience a speed increase

The presentation slides are available on SlideShare:

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Mar 03

PHP Snippet to Expand Shortened URLs

Development No Comments »

This snippet of PHP code takes any shortened URL, like those from Bitly, Google or Twitter, and expands it into the full and final destination URL.

function expandShortUrl($url)
{
	$headers = get_headers($url, 1);

	$loc = $headers['Location'];
	if(is_array($loc))
	{
		// get the highest numeric index
		$key = max(array_keys( $loc));
		return $loc[$key];
	}
	else
	{
		return $loc;
	}
}

Hat Tip: Deluxe Blog Tips and Karl Groves – Easily Expand Short URL Using PHP

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