Sep 26

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:

Mar 03

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

Tags: ,

css.php