Scott Barnham is a freelance developer working under the name Staplefish.
Recent Adventures in Freelancing...
Registered two domains and set up mail accounts on Zoho mail. Mail to both domains goes to the same account for convenience and so my client only pays for one Zoho user. The domains didn’t need a website, so I set them to redirect to their entries in Google maps.
Generated about 600 redirects for a client who was migrating his site to a different domain and didn’t want to lose any SEO value. I hosted the redirects with nginx and SSL, updated the DNS at GoDaddy and uploaded a sitemap to Google Search Console to get Googlebot to crawl the redirects and find the new site.
Malware cleanup on a WordPress site. There were three bogus admin users and it looked like one had been there for a month. The malware had broken something, causing the public site to not load.
Diagnosed an usual performance issue on a site. There was a css file which had an old domain name. The old domain was responding slowly (2 seconds) and the site was waiting for it, causing the page to load slowly. Fixing it made the site much faster, although PageSpeed Insights score did not improve much.
Fixed a gnarly JS issue where some html including script tag was being loaded using jQuery ajax. jQuery was running the content of the script tag before the html was added to the dom so it was failing. It used to work but then stopped, despite everything on the site, including jQuery version being really old. I fixed it by getting the JS to wait for the necessary elements to exist in the DOM.
Set up an ancient WP site to send mail through SES. I handled the DNS records for SES authorisation. It’s hard to install plugins on such an old site, so I made a simple custom plugin which set PHPMailer to use SES as an SMTP server.
Removed well-hidden malware on a WordPress site. The site was sometimes redirecting users to malicious sites. A Wordfence scan found no malware, but plenty of vulnerable plugins. After a lot of digging around I found the php malware that was causing redirects. It was in a WPCode snippet that was added to each page. The code also had css to hide the WPCode plugin from the WP admin UI. It was hard to find, but easy to remove.
I analysed the malware a little. It requests a DNS TXT record from a host made up of the infected site’s domain, the client IP, some flags for iPhone vs Windows, etc. The returned record is a base64 encoded url saying where to redirect the user.
Worked on a commercial WP performance plugin. Most of the work was UI-related, but I also included and auto-backup system so the user can restore previous settings if needed.
Started work on a migration from PostNuke to WordPress. Wrote a script to analyse the old database and generate json files for Advanced Custom Fields, so the PostNuke page types become Custom Post Types in WP with the same fields. The migration script reads data from the old database and creates posts of the right type in WP and adds data for the custom fields.