When I started playing around with WordPress in 2009, I thought it'd be fun to release a plugin one day. I've been playing with PHP & MySQL since about 2002 as a hobby, so I had the experience but I didn't know the WordPress way of doing things. I had a lot to learn. It wasn't long after I started in 2009 that I started making my own (private) custom themes, and (private) custom plugins. [Read More...]

Recently, we brought in a new voicemail system at work, and we needed a way to reliably test it. The idea was to have a human call in every 30 minutes and leave a simple "testing 1, 2, 3" voicemail. To me that seemed rather cumbersome for someone to remember to do this every 30 minutes. So I began to think of a way to automate this. That's when I had the idea for Asterisk to do this for me. [Read More...]

I had a situation recently where I needed to have a WordPress permalink redirect clients if they were an "authorized" IP address. Everyone else would get a 404. An example of this would be if you had a super long URL that you wanted to keep private, but wanted an easy-to-remember URL to access it. You should be able to access it from home, but everyone else would see a 404. A quick way to remember a URL without sacrificing security.Here's how I did it. [Read More...]

I always install Apache and PHP on my Raspberry Pi's so that I can write and deploy small web applications. Once they're setup, they're good to go. There are times where I'll get a new Raspberry Pi and/or have to reformat mine (typically because of boredom). This usually involves me having to remember how to install Apache, PHP, MySQL and phpMyAdmin from scratch. So I'm throwing together this small tutorial so that I can remember how to do this in the future. Hopefully it helps you out, too. [Read More...]

I wanted to post this quick tip on how to access an external database, or an external table, from within WordPress. This is mostly here for my reference in case I need it in the future. Hopefully it helps you out, too. [Read More...]