Zach Adams Web Developer and Programmer

Category: How To’s

How to disable the new Chrome Side Search Panel feature

August 9, 2023

A very annoying new "feature" added by Chrome in recent versions is adding search results to their new side-panel companion, including overriding the default behavior of the right-click contextual "Search Google for" on text selection. As far as I'm aware you're currently only able to disable it using flags, here's how to do it Read More

Keep Varying Vagrant Vagrants (VVV) in Sync across multiple computers

July 15, 2015

Varying Vagrant Vagrants (VVV) is a vagrant box designed for WordPress developers to setup a fully-functioning and fully-equipped local development server that can easily manage multiple WordPress sites. VVV is an awesome addition to any WP developers workflow, however one of the problems I had with it was its inability to sync files and databases across multiple computers. This meant that VVV was stuck on the computer it was installed on, and I needed to be able to work with VVV on my work computer and my laptop. Read More

Python Scraping for WordPress

April 5, 2015

Ofttimes when building for WordPress I find myself in a situation which requires me to move a ton of content from a clients old site to a new one. If I'm lucky (relatively speaking) it's built on another CMS such as Drupal or Joomla which I can export content from pretty easily, but most times it's a crappy site built using plain HTML and Microsoft Frontpage *shudder*, and it only has 4-5 pages of simple content. If I'm super lucky it has hundreds of pages rather than a few, that's when things get fun. If you've ever been the victim of the busy work known as "content-moving" fear no more, Python is here to save the day! Read More

Supercharge Your Browser for Web Development

February 3, 2015

Think about common tasks you do in your browser everyday. Open a tab, close a tab, right click on a link to open it in a new tab, duplicate that tab, etc, etc. Usually browsing the web requires a fair amount of mouse or trackpad movement, and that can slow… Read More

Making your own WPEngine-Like High Performance WordPress Server

January 16, 2015

Recently WPEngine released a new Vagrant machine called Mercury designed specifically for testing development WordPress sites with WPEngine's specialized High Performance servers. WPEngine has been well known for a long time to provide specialized WordPress Servers which can handle an insane amount of traffic on even the most complex WP sites. I'll show you how to make your own high performance WPEngine-Like Server for less then half the cost. Read More

Adding XDebug to Varying Vagrant Vagrants (VVV)

January 12, 2015

Using VVV for WordPress development is awesome, however sometimes the errors returned are confusing and difficult to debug. Thankfully there’s a PHP extension which makes tracing the errors returned by PHP and WordPress much, much easier and that’s XDebug. Installing XDebug on your VVV machine is easy:… Read More

Managing Multiple WordPress Sites for Free

October 2, 2014

If you happen to be managing multiple Wordpress sites then you probably know how frustrating it can be to keep every site updated and you definitely don't want the client having to call you in case their site goes down. Here's what we do to keep all our sites updated and ensure that the client doesn't have to come to us in case their site goes down. Read More

Ultimate Guide to Setup a WordPress Server

May 25, 2014

If you're anything like me server's piss you off. Not because they aren't cool, but because you'll get to a point where you have everything setup the way you want then you run into an issue that nobody on the internet has experienced. Worse still I'll have to start over completely with a new distro because the one you want to use isn't supported by someone or whoever. So this is the Ultimate Guide to Setting up a Wordpress Server for complete noobs who know almost nothing about linux or servers. This setup is a simple LEMP stack designed not to be too complicated for beginners. For more High Performance servers see my other post here. Read More