Site updates and dev notes — last entry: June 21, 2025. Track ongoing work, fixes, and content restructuring across the site.

An overview of setting up, securing, and maintaining a self-hosted VPS as the foundation of the site.

Covers key Linux setup tasks, from system updates to service management, forming the backbone of server operations.

Explains how DNS, SSL, and CDNs like Cloudflare optimize site speed, security, and worldwide accessibility.

How WordPress evolved from a casual setup into a structured, scalable content management system.

Custom WordPress code and tweaks hosted on GitHub. Click to view my open-source customizations and plugins.

How I configured my site’s security layers, including firewalls, plugin choices, and practical hardening steps to protect against common attacks.

Covers the tools, techniques, and strategies I use to improve my site’s speed, response time, and overall performance, both on the front end and server side.

Outlines my approach to organizing, optimizing, and integrating images across the site—balancing performance, quality, and long-term maintainability.

A dynamic framework connecting people, ideas, and media through structured tags, custom fields, and semantic relationships across the entire site.

A concise overview of backup approaches, tools, and recovery planning to protect your site from data loss and downtime.

Covers how contact forms and email systems are configured to ensure reliable communication and secure message delivery.

Leverage AI to streamline tasks like content creation, SEO, and image generation, enhancing site development speed and consistency.

Covers the tools and workflows used to manage, develop, and maintain the site, including Obsidian, VS Code, Git and WP-CLI.

An overview of current projects, active maintenance, and upcoming improvements planned for the site.

I need to find a way to reproduce the Wordpress footnotes system in Custom Post Types.

This taks is very annoying and will take some time, probably months. But it is essential for my task of ACF Pro custom field integration.

My sites are currently using Wordpress on Apache. It is more efficient on a low-end VPS to use NGINX.

At the bottom of chapters, it shows all the chapters associated tags. I want to fix this area to be more specifically controlled for use with future ACF Pro field integration.

I need to find a way to reduce the width of all cover blocks. They currently stretch beyond the main section.

I want to design a parallel data structure to separate content from layout, enabling clean dynamic page rendering across all site sections.

I just noticed that my post and chapter archives are disabled, except for uncategorized posts… Need to fix.

The left navigation bar acts funny sometimes. It has a delay where it will be stuck unless i scroll up twice.

I want to add a wikipedia bio to people referenced pages using wikipedia’s API and ACF Pros custom field to store wikipedia slug.

A summary of key milestones, fixes, and improvements already completed in the site’s development.

It is very easy to install Open source/free AI software locally. OpenAIs Whisper lets you convert any audio file to text locally. This allows you to keep your files private without having to upload them to a web-based transcriber.

I used Adminer to safely and efficiently replace featured image extensions with .webp in the database, avoiding manual updates while preserving file paths and post associations.

Using dd in Rescue Mode, I cloned my VPS’s disk for a full WordPress backup, ensuring bare-metal recovery.

ChatGPT has empowered me to create a site with more advanced features than I imagined possible. I have a lot of work ahead of me…

A breakdown of how my homepage grid reflects the full content lifecycle — from tasks to chapters — using dynamic WordPress structures.

Free 10GB Koofr storage makes encrypted chapter backups easy with rclone. Sync folders, save logs, and automate with aliases.

I want to find a way to use WordPress Command Line Interface to automate this task creation. That way I can simply run the script,…

I recently added my site to Google search console. This tool give you insights into how Google indexes your site and if it sees any issues.

Learn how to turn styled WordPress cover blocks into crisp images using Safari’s built-in developer tools on macOS.

I am currently converting all image to WebP format which is much smaller. This involves consolidating every image, one chapter at a time into a folder and renaming them according to my new naming convention.

I created CPTs for Artists, People Referenced, and Books. I also created ta grid page and individual templates for each CPT.

A journey into the heart of code and data—breaking systems down to their roots to master your craft from within.

A visual tour of raw data—how hex reveals the hidden structure behind files, randomness, text, images, and code.

What does your computer really see when it runs a program? Let’s peel back the layers of a simple XOR tool.

A single operator that can encrypt data, reverse strings, and even recover missing values? Welcome to the strange power of XOR.

Using Wireshark, we visualize how data travels through your machine and the network — revealing encapsulation in vivid, byte-level detail.

Most web traffic today is encrypted — but what does that really mean, and what does it protect you from?

GPG reveals the real distinction between cleartext, encoding, and encryption — a perfect entry into the world of modern cryptography.

Even if your web traffic is encrypted, your DNS queries may still leak what sites you visit. Here’s what that looks like—and how to stop it.

How passwords are stored, how hashes work, and why modern systems rely on salts to slow down attackers.

Raw tools like curl, telnet, and netcat let you explore, debug, and defy standards—revealing how systems actually behave.

Snort, ClamAV, and YARA reveal a shared logic between antivirus and network intrusion detection—pattern matching as control, insight, and defense.

I wanted to write an article on open source software, and specifically Linux. Sometimes I forget how deeply I understand these systems—and that many people…

A single memory instruction can make GPT-4-turbo more efficient—just ask, and it’ll start using fewer tokens.

Deleted files linger in free space. dev/urandom makes overwriting them easy. cat /dev/urandom > tmp. No paid tools needed—just raw terminal power.