Kevinleary.net, LLC.

Blog

Sensible approaches to build and maintain custom WordPress websites.

Seonix.org WordPress Redirect Hack

I picked up a strange issue on my WordPress site today while reviewing stats in Google Search Console. I noticed a malicious 301 redirect happening for an old post, one that had no redirect rules set. Specifically the post had a 301 redirect set to send traffic to seonix.org, which is definitely a malicious site.…

Regex Routes in Express.js

If you want to use regex for an Express.js route rule then you must use a JS regular expression object instead if string by wrapping your regular expression in slashes (/) instead of quotes (“). To look at a common usage example, let’s say you want the same route handler for two different root paths…

Angular $http Cache Examples

Angular’s built-in $http service and it’s $http.get() method do NOT cache responses by default. There are a few different ways you can enable $http caching, below are some helpful examples of each. These examples are ordered in terms of difficult, beginning with what’s easiest and most common. 1. Built-in $http Cache You can quickly enable…

Angular.js Custom Tag Delimiter’s

Angular’s templating system is wonderful, and it build’s on some common practices established years ago by the Handlebars templating engine. Sometimes I encounter projects where an existing templating system conflicts with Angular, such as a server-side templating language like Mozilla’s Nunjucks or PHP’s popular Twig template engine. In these situation it’s often handy to change…

Restrict an Angular.js Directive to a Specific HTML Tag

This is the best way I’ve found to create an Angular.js directive that’s restricted to a specific HTML element or tag. There’s no directive configuration option in Angular.js to do this, but I recommend adding the `restrict: ‘A’` to your directives config so that it only matches an attribute name. Once we have that in place the key aspect that makes this happen is this line: if ( element[ 0 ].tagName !== “A” ) { … }

How to Fix Slow Gulp Uglify Builds

I use gulp-uglify to minify my JavaScript for a large Angular.js project. Recently the compile process became incredibly slow, taking upwards of 15 seconds to compile JavaScript each. I’m convinced there is an underlying issue here, but for now I was able to solve the issue using a filesystem cache. This reduced a the JS build task with Uglify from 15-20 secs down to 500ms-1.5secs.

Preventing Possible Attempt to Enumerate Users [SOLVED]

What is User Enumeration? WordPress websites may reveal whether a username exists on system through the author query variable. When a web app leaks information about whether a username exists or doesn’t exist, this is called user enumeration. A common example is when you see a validation notice telling you that the username is already…

WordPress Database Migration & Transfer Tools

As of 2017 here are the two best ways I’ve found to handle the transfer of a WordPress database from development to production. WP Migrate DB Pro The WP Migrate DB Pro WordPress plugin will let you push, pull, and sync database tables between WordPress installations. This is substantially better than a basic find/replace for…

Combining WP_Query Search & Taxonomy Parameters

WP_Query is the primary way to write custom queries in WordPress. If you’re having trouble combining a search value (s argument) and taxonomy query (tax_query argument) using WP_Query try using the following class to solve the issue. /** * Search Within a Taxonomy * * Support search with tax_query args * * $query = new…

Self-Signed, Trusted Certificates for Node.js & Express.js

If you want to fully replicate an https/SSL Node.js/Express app server locally you’ll need a self-signed AND trusted certificate setup. More often than not I see dev’s settle with an untrusted state for their localhost, which is an annoying and frustrating work around. I don’t want to tell Chrome and Safari that I trust the website every single time I open it up. Luckily there’s a way around this, just follow the steps below on your mac to get `https://localhost` serving your Express.js Node app loading with SSL locally.

JSON POST Requests: $_POST Won’t Work

Receiving JSON POST data in PHP is a common scenario I come across when building custom WordPress API’s. If you’re working with JSON API’s powered by PHP you may find that $_POST is not working with JSON, and you may be seeing a broken response of Array or NULL. Processing $_POST data with application/javascript headers…

Simple JavaScript Error Tracking with Google Tag Manager

Track client-side JavaScript errors as Google Analytics events using Google Tag Manager and avoid error logging software.

Built-in WordPress Taxonomy & Post Type Reference

Below is a list of WordPress built in taxonomy names and built-in post type names. Never name your custom taxonomies and post types with one these to avoid collisions. Taxonomies category — Categories (Posts) post_tag — Tags (Posts) nav_menu — Menu items (Appearance > Menus) post_format — Post formats Post Types post — Posts page…

How to Reset a Geolocation Prompt in Google Chrome

This should have been easier to solve then it was, so I thought I’d post it here for anyone else looking for a way to reset a geolocation prompt in Google Chrome.

Angular On Enter Key Directive

I’ve been doing a lot work with Angular.js lately, and I continue to find directives more and more useful. Here’s a common directive I frequently use to trigger a scope method when the `ENTER` key is pressed.