Cloud Confusing
Explaining hosting, AWS, Wordpress, static sites, and all manner of cloud solutions.
How To Fix A 431 Error
Are you getting a 431 error on a page that you suspect should be working properly? There is a good chance that it’s a local issue and it’s an easy fix.
Sal November 4th, 2022
Posted In: Web Development
“The JSON object must be str, bytes or bytearray, not list” Python Error Solved
If you are working with JSON in Python, then you might run into a common problem. You’ll know you have a problem because when running your Python you’ll get an output error that reads, “the JSON object must be str, bytes or bytearray, not list.” In common Python fashion, the message actually makes some sense but you’re still left trying to figure out what to do next.
Sal October 24th, 2022
Posted In: Python
WordPress Polls and Caching
As more sites move to advanced caching solutions, it’s getting more difficult to have dynamic content coming in through plugins and similar solutions. Recently I was experimenting with WP-Polls, a popular (free) WordPress polling plugin alongside CloudFlare (Automatic Platform Optimization).
Sal October 20th, 2022
Posted In: Wordpress
How To Add A Canonical Override For A WordPress Page With Parameters
Content management systems tend to ignore URL parameters, but sometimes you don’t want this to happen. Here is how you fix that with WordPress.
Sal September 21st, 2022
Posted In: Web Development, Wordpress
UN/LOCODE Function Code Parsing
The United Nations location code identifier system (UN/LOCODE) has an interesting system for noting the function of a specific location. Basically there is an 8-digit “classifier” which changes based on the function of the space. While logically interesting, it’ll require some custom work to parse this classifier and get written values from it.
Sal September 16th, 2022
Posted In: Web Development
Tags: Location Data
How To WP Query For Posts Type Names?
If you are writing a typical WordPress wp query you might not even mention the “post_type” filter, where you limit the post types returned in your query.
If you are looking for a specific post type, or possibly a custom post type, then you will use
'post_type' => 'yourCustomPostTypeName'in order to only get results from that custom post type (CPT).
But what if you want you want to run a query to get the names of the post types, not the posts themselves?
Sal December 31st, 2021
Posted In: Web Development
Tags: Wordpress
How To Fix: WordPress WP Query Returns Results When It Shouldn’t
If you are doing custom work on WordPress, you probably are using WP query. These is basically a database, essentially SQL, inside the WordPress template in order to deliver a highly customizable set of posts. With the ability to customize comes a bit of complexity.
One of the weird things that can happen is that a WP query that should yield no results will sometimes return many results. How do you fix this?
Sal December 31st, 2021
Posted In: Web Development
How To Test GTM By Manually Firing Triggers
One of the the most annoying things about Google Tag Manager is the debugging process. When a tag doesn’t fire you can assume something is wrong with your trigger, but what was it? Time to refresh GTM preview, reload the page, and try again.
Sal June 5th, 2020
Posted In: Analytics
How to Set GTM Triggers and GA Reports on Multiple Random Pages
Google’s Tag Manager is a super useful tool, but, just like with Google Analytics and Ad Manager, it works best with types of things, not a set of specific things. For example, GA is great at finding the pageview count for every article that has custom dimension 2 = “true” but it’s not good at given the pageview count for a group of 10 random URLs are want to investigate.
This is particularly annoying when you are setting up very granular GTM triggers, but there is a simple work around. The same logic works in Google Analytics.
Sal May 20th, 2020
Posted In: Analytics
Tags: Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, GTM
How to Return a Data Attribute In GTM
Google Tag Manager (GTM) is a super useful tool for getting data into Google Analytics as well as a number of other tools. GTM is infinitely customizable and can fit almost anyone’s needs, if you have just a bit of knowledge of the toolset and Javascript. In this article we’ll walk through how to use GTM to grab data attributes from HTML and store that.
Sal February 22nd, 2020
Posted In: Analytics