The archive
Timeouts, crashes, security breaches and scaling failures: what broke, why it broke, and what actually fixed it. Plus the AI tooling I’m putting to work in WordPress.
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I used Codex to build an AI agent fleet that runs my websites: 15 agent profiles, 63 scheduled jobs, a model fallback chain and a live dashboard, built over a few days of sessions. Over the next three weeks…
To run Codex unattended safely, combine three features: scheduled tasks to run the check, hooks to enforce hard rules in code, and auto-review so a second agent assesses risky actions instead of nobody. I use it for recurring SEO…
When WordPress emails stop sending after a migration, the cause is almost always something the move changed: the sending IP, DNS records, SMTP credentials, the PHP mail setup or outbound firewall rules. Check each layer in order (WordPress, transport,…
All articles
When a WordPress site is slow or down, work through five steps in order: confirm the scope of the problem, check server health, correlate the logs by timestamp, isolate the failing layer, then recover with the lowest-risk change. Skipping…
If a WordPress site returns a 403 that Nginx rules and security plugin logs can’t explain, and replaying the request returns 200, check PHP’s auto_prepend_file setting. A script set there, often through a .user.ini file, runs before WordPress loads…
If Nginx reports unknown directive "valid_referers", check the compiled HTTP referer module before changing the rule. When that module is unavailable, a carefully scoped $http_referer check can deter cross-site image and video embedding. Test the configuration and three request…
To check a WordPress database’s charset and collation, run wp db query "SELECT @@character_set_database, @@collation_database;" for the database default, then query information_schema.TABLES for each table, because tables can differ from the default. A modern site should use utf8mb4, with…
Apple Pay is live in India from today, 30 September 2026. Axis Bank Visa and Mastercard credit cards work on iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch, with Mac support “coming soon”. You tap your phone at a card terminal and…
To block outbound traffic from an Ubuntu server to one IP address, insert a REJECT rule at the top of the OUTPUT chain: sudo iptables -I OUTPUT 1 -d 203.0.113.10 -j REJECT. The server can no longer open connections…
A practical architecture for running long AI workflows beside WordPress, with asynchronous REST workers that keep publishing responsive.
A WordPress REST API request can report that Basic Authentication is required even after HTTP authentication was disabled. That message does not prove that WordPress itself is demanding a Basic Auth header. The challenge may come from a browser…
If you run WordPress in 2026, hosting is no longer a commodity decision. It is a product decision, a security decision, and a revenue decision. I work in hosting support and DevOps every day, and I keep seeing the…
