Welcome to dmuth.org!

“Who disturbs my nap?”

Welcome to my website and blog! It has been been around in one form or another for well over a decade. It’s changed purposes a few times, and at this point is now a mostly tech blog where I share things I’ve learned or made.

Feel free to have a look around, or consider checking out some of the more popular posts I’ve made over the years:

Thanks for visiting, and feel free to reach out if you have any comments or just want to chat!

9 Essential WordPress Plugins

One does not simply appear in search engine results

When I made the move to WordPress a few weeks ago I had a lot to learn, both in terms of functionality that WordPress had to offer, as well as plugins that I could install and which of those plugins actually worked well!

So I’m going to spend this post sharing what plugins I found the most useful so that anyone else who is getting into WordPress can have an easier time getting started.

Open Graph

Even if you don’t use Facebook or Twitter, chances are that your visitors do and they share your content on those sites. So this plugin is probably the most important plugin of the entire list, because it adds the appropriate meta tags to ensure that when your content is shared on either service, it is rendered correctly.

Furthermore, the Open Graph plugin allows you to set a default image and override it with other an image from the post itself or one uploaded separately:

Again, I cannot stress it enough–if you want your content to look presentable on social media sites, you need to use this plugin. Otherwise, you are passing up a huge opportunity.

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Fixing Image Sizes on WordPress Attachment Pages

One of the neat things about WordPress is that when you upload an image and then include that image in a blog post, you can decide where that image links to. The image can link to nothing at all, the raw image, or an “attachment page” which contains that image and a caption.

That said, something that has caused me grief for out of the box WordPress builds has been the image on the media page being really small. Take for example, this picture of a freeloading cheetah. When I upload the picture, the attachment page looks like this:

Just look at that. A tiny image and a bunch of the page being completely unused. Disgraceful. Surely we can do better!

As it turns out, tweaking a single line of code can be used to change the size of all images on media pages.

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Fixing The Cover Image Height In WordPress’s Twenty Seventeen Theme

Overall, I am pretty happy with the Twenty Seventeen theme that ships with WordPress, but one thing that really drives me crazy is that whatever cover image you upload takes up nearly 100% of the entire web browser when viewing on a desktop or laptop.  I find it darn near infuriating, because I have to scroll down just to click on a menu link or see content.  That ain’t right.

I mean, just look at this:

We can do better.

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Fixing the Homepage Post Width in WordPress’s Twenty Seventeen Theme

I’m still relatively new to WordPress, but one of the things that really got me worked up was the width issue on the front page of my website.  I mean, just look at this:

I am screaming internally.

So I did some Google searches and actually didn’t have much luck.  There were no settings in WordPress that I could change, and the CSS settings that I found just didn’t work.

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Saying Goodbye to Drupal and Hello to WorldPress!

Way back in 2005, I converted my website (and its predecessor) over to Drupal.  Drupal has served me well for the last 13 years, but due to the direction in which Drupal as a product has moved, I do not feel it is the right choice for me anymore.

“U wot m8?”

So I instead checked out WordPress, and was rather happy with it.  It does one thing (blogging) really really well, instead of trying to be the “kitchen sink” like Drupal.  As of this writing, I’ve ported over just about all of the content I wanted to port over, and have since switched www.dmuth.org to point to this WordPress Install.

Along the way, I learned some thing about how to set up and configure WordPress, let me share them with you:

Looking forward to running this platform for the next 13 years. 🙂

— Doug

WordPress 5 in Docker with Nginx and LetsEncrypt

TL;DR If you are comfortable with Docker and Docker Compose, you can go straight to the GitHub repo and get started.  For the everyone else, read on…

WordPress + Docker = <3

When I stood up this website, I wanted to do so in Docker, but I ran into an issue: the official WordPress Docker image runs Apache.  Apache is a nice webserver for small amounts of traffic, but it does not scale well.  As more concurrent connections come into a server running Apache, more copies of the httpd process are forked, which causes RAM usage to go up.  Having RAM usage regularly go up and down  is not ideal.

Fortunately, there is a better way.  The Nginx webserver, combined with PHP running in FPM mode scales much better as the memory usage is more constant, which means that peak loads on the server won’t cause you to thrash the swapfile.  Encryption would also be nice, so I wanted to have some SSL going as well.

I couldn’t find any existing solutions, so I built one!  In this post, I’m going to walk through each piece of the puzzle.

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