Artem Russakovskii's programming and technology blog

One thing that's been continuously annoying me when doing WordPress development on the go is when something somewhere inside WordPress decides to send requests to external urls when I don't even have Internet connection or it's slow and flaky (tethering, slow Wi-Fi, etc). This results in random lag when loading pages, especially if I haven't opened my dev WordPress instance for a long time.

Turns out there's an easy and undocumented (other than in code) solution. To block external HTTP requests right in WordPress's core itself, open up wp-config.php and add WP_HTTP_BLOCK_EXTERNAL like so:

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define('WP_HTTP_BLOCK_EXTERNAL', true);

Whenever this variable is present, external requests will be ignored, unless you specify your own comma-separated whitelist …

Updated: February 2nd, 2011

WordPress has a great way of letting you use simple text tags called shortcodes to provide a whole bunch of functionality, including custom PHP code. In this article, I'm assuming that you already know what shortcodes do and how they operate (if you don't, head over here: Shortcode_API).

One glaring omission in the way shortcodes are set up by default is that they only get triggered in the content of your post, leaving the sidebar and comments out. I'm sure this is done for security, so that your readers can't screw something up by posting shortcodes they're not supposed to – after all, shortcodes are PHP snippets on the backend.

However, let's assume you really know what you're doing …

First of all, I'd like to thank everyone who read and gave their 2 cents about the [Wordpress Plugin Development] How To Include CSS and JavaScript Conditionally And Only When Needed By The Posts post. The article was well received and will hopefully spark some optimizations around loading styles and scripts.

Here are some discussions and mentions around the web:

• an article on Weblog Tools Collection
• a forum post on WP Tavern
• twitter retweets

Sure, there are drawbacks to this method and it does require some more processing on the backend and it's not for everyone, which is why we should always strive for an even better solution.

I stand by my point of view that, for instance, my dedicated …

Updated: September 16th, 2012

Introduction

StackOverflow is an amazing site for coding questions. It was created by Joel Spolsky of joelonsoftware.com, Jeff Atwood of codinghorror.com, and some other incredibly smart guys who truly care about user experience. I have been a total fan of SO since it went mainstream and it's now a borderline addiction (you can see my StackOverflow badge on the right sidebar).

The Story

Update 6/21/09: This server is currently under very heavy load (10-200), even with caching plugins enabled. Please bear with me as I try to resolve the situation.

Feel free to bookmark this page and return to it later when the fires have been put out.

Update 06/21/09: I think I've got the situation …