Kaspars Dambis

GitHub - wpelevator/encrypted-secrets: [READ ONLY] A PHP library for encrypting secrets [READ ONLY] A PHP library for encrypting secrets. Contribute to wpelevator/encrypted-secrets development by creating an account on GitHub.

I worked on an API for that a while back: github.com/wpelevator/e...

The Connectors screen in WP 7.0 would really benefit from encrypted options unless we want to expose those API keys to anyone with access to wp-admin/options.php

The trick was to create 1 FPS videos with full audio so that it still has access to full video contents and audio but with ~5% of the file size. Worked great.

ChatGPT wouldn't do it, Claude wouldn't do it.

Eventually tried Perplexity and it was able to generate notes with correct code snippets from my WordPress course videos. Amazing since it didn't have to invent anything -- just capture everything I said and include the relevant code snippets.

To enable it, add this configuration to .vscode/launch.json file.

WordPress block development with breakpoint debugging for JS is a life-changer! So is PHP breakpoints, to be honest.

Instead of hunting for the correct file in the browser console, you just add breakpoints in VS Code and it automatically stops JS at that point to show you the full state.

When can we reasonably expect all macOS apps to use the correct squircle radius?

I can't believe VSCode and Google Chrome are still different from the Finder or any of the built-in apps...

Be sure to check out the included library of shortcuts and automations for inspiration. Here is the "Record Coding" automation that I built.

I can't believe I'm discovering the Apple Shortcuts just now.

In one click it can now get my computer ready for screen recording -- it opens VS Code, web browser + recording app, and resizes the windows to fit a specific aspect ratio.

The app is bundled with every Mac and iPhone since 2021.

I couldn’t find a way to do it across multiple recordings. I wanted pattern extraction against 50 recordings (of the same page).

The individual ones worked fine with the built-in AI. Not really actionable because you can’t ask follow-up questions.

Great tool overall, though!

Here is what it said:

"Why Users Reach the Price but Don’t Buy

These are clear, recurring behavioral patterns that explain why purchases stall near the end — even when traffic quality and checkout functionality are fine.

This is not a traffic problem.
This is late-funnel decision friction."

Can AI help optimize your landing pages from actual user session data?

We enabled user session recording using PostHog (which uses rrweb behind the scenes), and drove Meta ads to the page.

Then used AI to extract those 36k+ events into a single file and asked it to analyze the results.

Turns out that building a "Clear formatting" feature for the WordPress block editor is more difficult than I imagined.

Many blocks have the inner content as part of the `content` attribute but things get difficult with RichText, for example.

Do you have a solution for this?

Trying to find an alternative to Screen Time for kids on macOS since it’s completely unreliable and the UX is terrible.

AdGuard/PiHole with a macos user profile that enforces DNS seems like one option. Need to be local and selfhosted.

Suggestions?

After sunsetting a VPS that was used for backup of other VPSes, I decided to have #restic send everything to a restic-rest instance (as docker container) on my #homelab NAS over #wireguard.

Amazing how restic can backup to so many destinations (s3, sftp, http) over so many transports.

Add logging to my kitchen-sink WordPress plugin with handlers for error_log() and Query Monitor.

Nice to have info/debug level data while developing and warnings+ on PROD.

How are you handling this in your plugins?

Just make sure to allow UDP connections on port 443 in your server firewall to avoid hours of debugging like I did 😂

Did you know that HTTP3 is already supported by 92% of browsers and can offer 10-20% performance improvements (mostly to LCP) especially for mobile users?

Nginx added support for HTTP/3 two years ago in version 1.25.0 so it is available in most recent Linux distributions.

Did you know there is a way to check the historic web vitals for your sites from actual user data?

Try it out here: cruxvis.withgoogle.com

Has anyone had luck registering for AliExpress API access?

Getting auto-rejected and not sure what to try next.

Uses — Kaspars Dambis Here is a list of tools and services I love and use (last updated on November 2025): Computing MacBook Pro (M1 2021). iPhone 11 (3rd battery) and looking to upgrade to iPhone 17. Apple Watch Series 8 for tracking sleep, gym, walks and bike rides. QNAP TS-435XeU (Amazon) home-lab server for Home Assistant and Scrypted...

Check out my updated /uses list with the latest gear and software changes from 2025: kaspars.net/uses

The #FAIR plugin for WP doesn’t like iOS Safari. Probably an outdated regex on user agent?

The Anti-Framework - Serverless Industries After all these years, I still love PHP. Every time when I create a small or big personal project which should work for a long time with low effort, I choose PHP over .NET or Angular. It “just works”.

Amazing how little PHP can do so much! serverless.industries/2025/07/06/a...

I also do 99% of prototyping in PHP.

Fun idea from @christian@einbeck.social

Turns out HTTP Host headers can have a trailing dot (totally valid too) and nginx will happily forward it to php-fpm making $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] have a trailing dot which then fails all WP multisite domain lookups...

First time seeing this on a fresh nginx + php 8.4 setup.

How do you profile PHPStan runs for performance issues?

It appears to be spawning a child process even if maximumNumberOfProcesses is set 1 which makes the core logic invisible to XDebug profiler.

Trying out the new VS Code fork from Google.

Requires Google login to actually use it... not sure I like this direction.

Feels like half the web is down now...

Cloudflare and other MITM proxies with TLS termination have access to your WP usernames and passwords, and every WooCommerce transaction (including customer billing and address data).

Version 3.0.0 of the Minit plugin for WordPress now defers the script bundle by default and uses this trick to support scripts with "after" logic (which require the parent to be loaded).

Learn more here: github.com/kasparsd/minit

Replace Image Upload a new version of an image without deleting the old image attachment, so that references to the image remain intact.

OK, found it. It is coming from this plugin wordpress.org/plugins/repl... which uses that for busting cache.