There are roughly a GAJILLION articles, blogs, and documents out there that explain how to setup Amazon CloudFront to work with WordPress.

Most of them are wrong in one or more ways.

This post has been sitting in the "drafts" folder for a while now. Clearly, since it's August and is therefore a little late to be deciding on a plan that is supposed to carry through all 12 months of 2017. Regardless, I think it's still worth sharing how I've attempted to increase the frequency of my blogging. My basic goal for 2017 is:

Create more content in 12 months than I ever have before in order to a) significantly build up the depth and breadth of knowledge on my blog, b) increase my skills as a writer, and c) continue to build this blog and the readership as a key part of my online persona and brand.

In order to achieve this goal, I've identified a couple of tactical objectives:

1. Reduce the friction between me and the keyboard; make it possible to "just write".
2. Be able to "just write" anywhere. At home. On vacation. In a waiting room. On an airplane. I should also be able to start a post in one location and pick it up again in another. Indirectly this means I need to be able to write on any of my computers or mobile devices.

In order to meet these goals, I needed to improve my tools and come up with a better workflow.

Two of the WordPress plugins I use on this site are Twitter Mentions as Comments and Growmap Anti Spambot Plugin. The first, TMAC, watches Twitter for any tweets that link to a post somewhere on this blog and submits those tweets as new comments on that particular post. GASP's job is to keep spammers from submitting spammy comments by placing a Javascript-driven checkbox in the comment form. A user must check the box to confirm they are not a spambot before submitting their comment.

Both of these plugins are great and work really well on their own.

However, when both plugins are in use and TMAC submits a comment, GASP inspects the comment to see if the checkbox has been marked, finds that it hasn't been, and silently rejects the comment. (Aside: the exception to this is if you are a logged-in user and you initiate a manual TMAC check, any new tweets will successfully pass through GASP).

As a follow-on to my previous post about disabling plugins, this script will enable plugins from the shell.

Lately I've been working with a separate instance of my WordPress site for development and testing of plugins, my theme, etc. I have a helper script that orchestrates the pulling of files and copying of the database from the production server into the dev server. I found that it would be nice to disable certain plugins that I don't want running in the dev instance (ie, plugins that notify search indexes when new posts are made) from within this script.