WPSSO RRSSB – Ridiculously Responsive Social Sharing Buttons

July 28, 2015Updated on December 4, 2024 JS Morisset WPSSO RRSSB

WPSSO Ridiculously Responsive Social Sharing Buttons (WPSSO RRSSB) version 0.2 has just been released this morning.

This new extension plugin for WPSSO adds Ridiculously Responsive Social Sharing Buttons to posts / pages, custom post types, bbPress, BuddyPress, WooCommerce product pages, and many more. The sharing buttons can be included in your content, excerpts, in a floating CSS sidebar, in a widget, from shortcodes, and on admin editing pages. The Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) used by WPSSO RRSSB resize automatically to their container size, so they always look great from any device, including high resolution retina displays.

WordPress Lies About Image Sizes / Dimensions

December 18, 2013Updated on December 4, 2024 JS Morisset WordPress

There are a few functions available to retrieve the URL and size of an image in the WordPress Media Library, but few people know that these functions will often lie about an image’s dimensions.

As an example, let’s define a custom image size of 1000 x 1000 cropped, and use image_downsize() to retrieve the URL and size of an image ID (this example can be used with wp_get_attachment_image_src() as well). I’ll use list() in the example, instead of an array variable for the return values, to keep the code more readable. ;-)

add_image_size( 'my-custom-size', 1000, 1000, true );

list( $img_url, $img_width, $img_height, $img_is_intermediate ) = image_downsize( $id, 'my-custom-size' );

WordPress will return a URL for the image and the values of $width / $height may be 1000 / 1000 – it all depends on several factors.

Read Adobe XMP / XML in PHP

April 9, 2013Updated on December 4, 2024 JS Morisset PHP, WordPress

I’ve found a few snippets of PHP code to read XMP / XML meta data from an image file, but none that I would call very robust or efficient. I ended up writing my own for Underwater Focus, and I’m quite pleased with the result. In fact, after adding support for a shortcode, I packaged it as an Adobe XMP plugin for WordPress.

The first part of using XMP meta data is reading the XMP information from the image. I’ve seen a few solutions that read the whole file into memory, and others that read-in just a small part. If the XMP / XML contains a lot of information, that small part may be incomplete. And each time the XMP meta data is required, the original (and sometimes quite large) image file must be re-read. Since the XMP doesn’t change unless the original image is updated, there’s no reason to keep re-reading the same large file time and time again.

Optimize Images to Save Bandwidth and Speed Page Load

February 3, 2013Updated on December 4, 2024 JS Morisset Bash, Perl, UNIX (Generic), WordPress

A few weeks ago I mentioned the wesley.pl script from GitHub to optimize images, and how I had modified it to keep (or discard) the EXIF / XMP information. Making sure images are as small as possible is important to save bandwidth and improve page load times (and google rank), so I think it’s worth discussing my image optimization process in more detail.

Secure Vulnerable WordPress Files and Directories

December 28, 2012Updated on December 3, 2024 JS Morisset HTTP Server, WordPress

Recently Jason A. Donenfeld reported a simple vulnerability in W3 Total Cache on the Full Disclosure mailing list, which was picked up by the Security Ledger website, and then posted on Slashdot. The vulnerability is a simple Apache Httpd configuration oversight — plugins often create their own folders under ./wordpress/wp-content/ without considering that directory indexing might be turned on, or that files within that folder are located under a DocumentRoot, and thus available to anyone. Some configuration files are also vulnerable in this way — the wp-config.php file, for example. During the WordPress install, it is recommended that the wp-config.php be re-located one folder above ./wordpress/, to move it out of the DocumentRoot.

WordPress OS Disk Cache Report, Prime and Flush

December 6, 2012Updated on December 4, 2024 JS Morisset Bash, UNIX (Generic), WordPress

I wrote a bash script this morning to report the size of WordPress cache folders, the number of files they contain, read each file to prime the OS disk cache, and optionally flush the OS disk cache as well. This might be a script you could execute to email a daily/weekly report of cache folder sizes, or perhaps execute during/after booting a server to prime the OS disk cache, or even on a regular schedule to make sure the OS cache is always primed. The script also has a “flush” argument to sync and drop the OS disk cache, which isn’t very useful (to me) except to see the difference in speed between a clean and primed cache (about 11s vs 0.4s for all websites on my server).

Beautify Query Strings with Rewrites

September 29, 2012Updated on December 2, 2024 JS Morisset HTTP Server, UNIX (Generic), WordPress

Sometimes I’ll work on something just to see what it looks like when it’s done. I guess this Apache rewrite might be something like that — I wanted to change the WordPress search query from /?s=value to /s/value, just to make the URL look a little prettier. :) There are probably a few ways to do this, and if you’d like to share some alternatives, feel free to post a comment.

There are two parts to this problem; The first, executing a search query from an /s/value URL, is easily addressed by a rewrite and proxy command. The second problem — how to rewrite a regular search query, but not a proxied search query — is a little tricker. I decided to add an htproxy hostname to my domain with an IP of 127.0.0.1. Then in a rewrite condition, I check for the htproxy hostname, and skip the rewrite if it’s a proxied request. The htproxy hostname must be included in the website’s Apache config as a ServerAlias.