code – Doug's Home On The Web

January 5th, 2019May 18th, 2019

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.

November 6th, 2016July 20th, 2019

ssh-to: Easily manage dozens or hundreds of machines with SSH

Hey software engineers! Do you manage servers? Lots of servers? Hate copying and pasting hostnames and IP addresses? Need a way to execute a command on each of a group of servers that you manage?

I developed an app which can help with those things, and my employer has graciously given me permission to open source it.

First, here’s the link:

https://github.com/comcast/ssh-to

And here’s how to download a copy:

git clone https://github.com/Comcast/ssh-to.git

October 11th, 2016March 16th, 2019

Two New Open Source Projects

At my day job, I get to write a bit of code. I’m fortunate that my employer is pretty cool about letting us open source what we write, so I’m happy to announce that two of my projects have been open sourced!

The first project is an app which I wrote in PHP, it can be used to compare an arbitrary number of .ini files on a logical basis. What this means is that if you have ini files with similar contents, but the stanzas and key/value pairs are all mixed up, this utility will read in all of the .ini files that you specify, put the stanzas and their keys and values into well defined data structures, perform comparisons, and let you know what the differences are. (if any) In production, we used this to compare configuration files for Splunk from several different installations that we wanted to consolidate. Given that we had dozens of files, some having hundreds of lines, this utility saved us hours of effort and eliminated the possibility of human error. It can be found at:

https://github.com/Comcast/compare-ini-files