Computing – Ben Lobaugh Online

Canonical URL plugin for WordPress released!

On August 31, 2018

In Computing, Web Development, WordPress

Have you run into this scenario? You have content that needs to live on multiple sites but you are concerned about SEO issues duplicating said content?

As search engines crawl the web looking for pages to include in their search indexes they may run across content duplicated from another site. When that happens the search engine will first attempt to determine which site is the “source of truth”. The site with duplicated content will be penalized in rankings. If no source can be found both sites rankings will be penalized. An SEO nightmare.

Is it possible to distribute the same content to multiple sites without incurring this penalty? The answer is a resounding YES! All you need to do is let the search engine know where the real of the article is, the canonical article. This is done by including a tag in the html head area. It is for search engines, humans do not typically see it.

WordPress has some built in canonical abilities however in WordPress itself there is no way to set the canonical url. I tend to have articles published all over the web that I would like to copy to this site for posterity. Today I whipped up a little plugin that provides a simple url field to add the article’s canonical url in a search engine friendly way.

It is as simple as adding the url as you create the article!

Publish your post and WordPress will handle the rest.

Here is an example post that I wrote on team building for WebDevStudios.

9 Critical Concepts for Leading High-Performance Teams

You may notice there is also a brief disclaimer at the top of the article. That is optional and may be helpful to some readers and/or required by the site you are reposting from to comply with guidelines.

If you want to use this plugin on your own site simply head over to Github and download the plugin!

https://github.com/blobaugh/canonical-url-for-wordpress

Find total number of post records on a WordPress Multisite in MySQL

By Ben Lobaugh (blobaugh)

On August 3, 2018

In Computing, MySQL, Programming, Web Development, WordPress

I was recently asked for the total number of posts on a WordPress website. Normally as simple as looking at the number in the dashboard, however in this instance the WordPress install was a Multisite with nearly 100 sites. That would have taken far too long to do manually, but what about having MySQL do the heavy lifting for me?

The information_schema database contains data about every database and table on the server. One of the metrics it stores is the count of rows in a table. We can use that to extrapolate roughly how many entries are in all the posts tables combined. This is not an exact science, however it will get you close to the real numbers. I argue that it will typically be “close enough” on larger installs, such as the one I was looking at.

In the following query, just replace the database name with your database and run it.

SELECT SUM( table_rows )
FROM information_schema.TABLES 
WHERE 
	table_schema = "{{YOUR_DATABASE_NAME}}" 
	AND table_name LIKE '%_posts';

Copy data from one Google Drive to another domain

By Ben Lobaugh (blobaugh)

On July 27, 2018

In Computing, Computing Tips

Transferring data from one Google account to another is typically as easy as sharing the files with another user and making them owner. There is a caveat though, you have to be on the same domain or GSuite account. Transferring ownership from your business account to your personal account is “not possible”.

I found myself in just such a situation. I had a single folder called Personal that I kept all my personal files in. After scouring the interwebs I found a script called Drive Migrator.

Drive Migrator does not actually move files between accounts. Instead it makes duplicate copies. If you need the data removed from the old account you will have to remove it yourself.

Here is how it works:

Login to the Google Drive you want to migrate. Share the folder you wish to migrate with the new Google account.
Visit the Drive Migrator script. Login with the account you are migrating to.
Select the shared folder that you wish to migrate from. This is where it is handy if everything you want is in a single folder, like the Personal folder I had.
Click COPY!
Pour yourself a scotch and kick back to wait for the migrator to do its thing.

The script could take a while to run. While it is running you will find a spreadsheet listing the progress. When it completes you will have a folder titles “backup-*” in the root of the target Google Drive. It should contain all the files from the other account.

Double check the contents of the new folder. At this point it should be safe to delete the old folder.

Run a wp-cli command across the network

By Ben Lobaugh (blobaugh)

On April 16, 2018

In Computing, Web Development, WordPress

Need to run a wp-cli command across a network of WordPress sites?

Here is an example of how to add/update an option on every site on the network using wp-cli.

wp site list --field=url | xargs -n1 -I % wp --url=% option update my_option my_value

This is really two commands in one. Lets break them down:

wp site list --field=url

This command will get a list of all the sites on the network. The output is a list of the urls for the given site. Passing the url to a command on a network chooses the site to run the command on.

xargs -n1 -I % wp --url=% option update my_option my_value

Here is the kicker. This command takes the output of the previous command into xargs. Xargs then run the new wp command with each site’s url in it.

Using wget to crawl your website

By Ben Lobaugh (blobaugh)

On April 2, 2018

In Computing, Computing Tips, Linux, OS X

If you are looking to crawl your website for something like cache warming you can do so with wget quite easily.

The following wget command will crawl a site and leave nothing behind on the local filesystem afterward.

wget --mirror -q -e robots=off -p -r --delete-after -nd http://www.isleofmtv.com

–mirror	crawls the entire site
-q	prevents wget from writing output to the buffer
-e robots=off	ignores directives in robots.txt
-p	get all page assets
-r	recursively request pages
–delete-after	clean up any local files after running wget
-nd	prevents wget from writing a directory structure that gets left behind

Ben Lobaugh Online

I think, therefore I am. I am, therefore I sail

Category: Computing (Page 1 of 48)

Canonical URL plugin for WordPress released!

Find total number of post records on a WordPress Multisite in MySQL

Run a wp-cli command across the network

Using wget to crawl your website

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