Here at Exygy, we do a lot of custom WordPress work. We’re all accomplished sysadmins, but we hate taking phone calls late at night, and we really prefer to focus on building rather than hosting if we can. So we’re really digging the new(ish) wave of WordPress-focused hosts that have come on line lately to help us with our WordPress work. These are kind of like Heroku was for Rails — the “Herokus for WordPress”! Here’s a quick comparison of a three of the most popular WordPress-focused hosting providers:

Conclusions

ZippyKid

ZippyKid seems like a solid web host that is geared toward smaller sites and sites that don’t get a lot of traffic. If you are creating a new blog and want to get started out for free, ZippyKid is a great option.

Pros

• Free up to 5,000 pageviews per month.
• Only $25 up to 100,000 pageviews a month.

Cons

• Not as well known as the other 2 options.
• Seems to be geared toward smaller sites, so it may be difficult to grow with them.

Page.ly

Page.ly is definitely a step up from ZippyKid if you look at both their prices and their bandwidth limits. They seem to be a good option for already established, medium-to-large sites with a decent amount of traffic.

Pros

• Less expensive than WP Engine.
• Higher bandwidth limits than WP Engine.

Cons

• Custom plans start at $1050/month, so your costs could go up substantially if you outgrow their Pro plan.
• Git is only available with custom plans.
• CDN costs extra.

WP Engine

WP Engine has positioned itself as the premium WordPress hosting provider, based on both price and what they offer. They seem like a great option for people who run a lot of WordPress sites, sites that get lots of traffic, and especially sites where security is important. They offer both scalability and very tight security.

Pros

• Premium service and support.
• Tight security and easy scalability.
• They seem to get a lot of love on Twitter.

Cons

• More expensive than the other 2 options.

I spent the last 24 hours trying to figure out why an iPhone app would not get answers from its cakephp backend server on AT&T only (3G and 4G). The app would work properly on the same device over Wifi. We tested other devices running on Sprint and Verizon, they were able to receive data from the server.

We were able to monitor the query leaving the iPhone app, getting to the server, and the server sending the correct answer. The content length would be the same for each call but the iPhone would get different data:

Over wifi

Over AT&T

Notice here that the answer gotten over AT&T is shorter than the one over Wifi. It is then impossible for the json parser to interpret just a portion of the data explaining why the “Data to String” (stringification of the NSDictionary previously printed as “Data”) is null.

Here is how we fixed the problem: by manually setting the content-type of the answer in the header of the response:

My guess is that AT&T would not transfer all of the HTTP response at once and the iPhone would close the connection too early. Setting the content type would tell AT&T that all the data block has to be transferred at once.

• You live in Excel spreadsheets
  Growth hackers are driven by data and like to create their own systems.
• You love products
  Growth hackers love to dig into products, find out how they work, and look for ways to improve them.
• You are a metrics master
  Growth hackers love studying analytics and looking for patterns.
• You are obsessed with optimization
  Growth hackers are always looking for ways to optimize user acquisition and experience.
• You are constantly learning
  Growth hackers are never satisfied. There are always new ideas, techniques and inspiration to be found.
• You are a theorizer and tester
  A growth hacker’s mantra is: Hypothesis. Do. Learn. And Repeat.

We’re super-excited to unveil our first public plugin, Posts to Newsletters.

This plugin allows you to easily create newsletters from your posts. You can:

• Customize the template of your newsletters to use your logo and custom styles.
• Add any number of posts (or custom post types) to each newsletter.
• Optionally create and send MailChimp campaigns directly from WordPress.

You can find out more about it at the WordPress Plugin Directory here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/posts-to-newsletters/.

The solution: Add the following line to your wp-config.php file – anywhere above the line that says require_once(ABSPATH . ‘wp-settings.php’)

define(‘WP_POST_REVISIONS’, true);

If you still don’t see your revisions now when you are editing a post or page, click the Screen Options link in the top right of the screen and make sure Revisions is checked.

The problem is that the Postie plugin tries to define the WP_POST_REVISIONS constant as false at the beginning of the script and then redefine it at the end of the script. However, redefining a constant in PHP is not allowed. So unless you have declared the constant as true in your wp-config.php file, the Postie plugin will override the default value and set it to false.

I hope this saves you some time and frustration!

At Exygy, we use FreshBooks to keep track of employee hours and to invoice our clients.

We also use QuickBooks for bookkeeping, and it was starting to become a hassle having to “double enter” our invoices in both FreshBooks and QuickBooks.

Being a custom software development shop in San Francisco, we thought: “Why not create a tool that allows us to import FreshBooks invoices into QuickBooks?”, and save ourselves the time and frustration of manually copying our invoices from FreshBooks to QuickBooks.

So we created QuickFresh, a super-simple (and free!) tool that allows you to import your FreshBooks invoices into QuickBooks.

As of April 2012, we are currently in public beta. Please feel free to try it out and let us know if you have any questions or suggestions!

QuickFresh: Import your FreshBooks invoices into QuickBooks

Here’s Zach’s prezi from WordCamp SF:

You can also download it here:
http://prezi.com/umdwzqghy1jk/wordcamp-presentation-zach-berke/

(reposted from our new Tumblog)

We have a ton of WordPress installs on a few different servers.

Many of them were using timthumb.php — which recently had the WordPress community a-flutter about a “zero day exploit” (see here).

We wanted to fix everything in one fell swoop. Here’s a quick snippet of code that you can run, as root, on your server to update all the instances of timthumb.

#!/bin/sh
mkdir tmp
cd tmp
wget http://timthumb.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/timthumb.php
for timthumb in `locate timthumb.php`; do
cp timthumb.php ${timthumb}
done

You may want to run

updatedb

(also as root) first if you don’t have a cron job setup that keeps the file database that is used by locate.

If you’re not sure how to run this script:

1. Become root (su) (or you can run each of the commands below as a sudo’er)
2. Save the script above to “fixthumb.sh” (cat > fixthumb.sh then paste the script in, then hit ctrl-c)
3. Chmod it to 755 and run it (./fixthumb.sh)
   or just run it with sh (/bin/sh ./fixthumb.sh)

If you need the above instructions, that implies you may not know exactly whatchyer doing as root… in which case you should BE REAL CAREFUL D00D! root is dangerous.

Zach is speaking at WordCamp. He’s featured on the WordCamp site next to WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg. In our geeky world, this is pretty sweet! Check out the screenshot: