Some WordPress headaches

You may have noticed things looking a little different around here. Over the past 3-4 weeks I noticed some serious performance issues with my website and could not pinpoint the root cause. I disabled all of my plugins and caching tools to try and get to the bottom of the problem. There seemed to be some rogue process that was making huge calls to the database and was eventually locking it up, causing the site to timeout. Unfortunately none of the fixes I tried worked and instead I opted to do a backup of text and images and essentially delete the website to start from scratch.

So far I think I have gotten things back to an acceptable state but you will probably see some weird things as I play with the theme and try to clean up old content that is not relevant or valuable. Feel free to let me know if you run into something that is causing problems or doesn’t looking right. You can reach me on Twitter or Threads or Mastodon.

25 Years of PHP

I know, I’m a day late… On June 8, 1995 Rasmus Lerdorf announced “Personal Home Page Tools (PHP Tools)” on a CGI usenet board (now converted to a Google Group). PHP quickly became a great way to make dynamic websites and it is still going strong today. I started using PHP in 2001 and I still turn to it for projects, including this website. Sure it has its quirks and bugs but it has been an evolving language that to this day has a loyal following.

New programming languages have been created and I am sure a lot of people have moved on to them (Node, Go, Rust, etc.) but PHP still drives a large chunk of the internet, something like 80 million websites. I have met a lot of friends because of the language including Chrispian, Patrick, Brad, Brandon, and many others at WordCamp events, or programming meetups. I am really thankful for those friendships.

Anyway, I’m happy for Rasmus Lerdorf and for the language.