The introduction of lazy-loading of images as of WordPress 5.5 improves site performance by delaying them until the user scrolls into view making our pages feel faster by only loading images as we need to see them.
The Problem
However, I needed a way to disable lazy loading for specific features like this image carousel where the last few slides would not load as they rotated into view. 🙁
A blank space where an image should appear. Lazy Loading somehow prevented the image from displaying on first pass while using Foundation 6’s Orbit Carousel.
The Solution
Disable lazy loading of the carousel images using this template part.
It quickly creates a snapshot of the database but I needed an efficient way to manage my wp-content folder where WordPress saves all my themes, plugins and media files. This is where duplicity comes in.
While logged into my website via ssh I use a simple command to create and update an archive of my wp-content folder and save it just out of public reach.
Note: My website’s setup uses /var/www/html as the public folder and /var/www/ is not shared by my apache web server.
Not much has changed from a my last backup a moment ago
Duplicity quickly updates a snapshot of my wp-content folder.
As you can see above, the archive is 649 MB but nothing new was added since the last backup a few minutes earlier. This is key, only changes are recorded and it doesn’t duplicate files that haven’t changed.
In practice I run a duplicity backup every time I perform a database backup. This allows me to restore static files along the database.
Selecting a specific date to restore from my backups.
Restoring this website’s wp-content folder to my desktop
My wp-content folder restored to my desktop
Duplicity would have been perfect for restoring that plugin I deleted six months ago ::smh::
Joseph Dickson – a month ago
Why I Love Duplicity
A few months back I had deleted a WordCamp slide presentation that accompanied my session on WP_Query. I didn’t have this workflow in place and it would have saved me a lot of time. I could have simply restored the missing files along with the database to my local testing server.
As duplicity’s archive grows I will probably prune it along with my webhost’s log files to keep my Ubuntu droplet nice an lean.
Over the next few months I may even go as far to run a cron job that updates the duplicity backup and the WordPress database so all I need to do is log in to download them. 😉
Offline and Duplicate Backups
Below is an example of an local archive I earlier today which includes the duplicity backup, MySQL database, wp-config.php and .htaccess that can be used to clone or restore my website at another location. 😀
Most importantly I can store this on my desktop where I run daily backups and copy it to a USB flash drive in the event my webhost, computer crash on the same day I’ll still have a third offline backup.
Why Backup Manually?
I wanted to take a more personal and intentional approach to backing up this website and canceled my Jetpack account a few months ago which provided flawless daily backups and restoration via VaultPress.
Jetpack has a lot of features I really didn’t use or appreciate so taking on the challenge of keeping my own local archive of my website seemed like a good idea. I now backup my website’s backups along with my desktop and laptop 🙂
Today an issue came up where a reader of one of a site I manage was referring to content that was out of date. Normally that’s not a problem but in this case it is a timely pandemic documentation page where the content is very likely to be out of date within a couple months if its not routinely updated.
To solve this challenge I decided to write a small function that will check the last modified date of a post and place an alert below the title and above the content. That notice would read…
This page has not been updated in 60 days. The information below may be outdated.
Which is a casual way of alerting the reader that if this information is timely perhaps check elsewhere on the site for a newer post. Likewise, if that person is looking for an older post they can safely disregard the notice. posting a discrete notice can come in handy depending on the context that brought a reader to the post.
Functions.php
<?php
// If post is older than 60 days return true
function jd_is_old_post($days = 60 ) {
$days = (int) $days;
$offset = $days*60*60*24;
if ( get_post_modified_time() < date('U') - $offset )
return true;
return false;
}
?>
Place within the WordPress Loop
<?php
// If post is older than 60 days display this notice
if ( jd_is_old_post() ) {
echo '<div class="old-post-notice">';
echo '<p><strong>This page has not been updated in 60 days. The information below may be outdated.</p></strong>';
echo '</div>';
}
?>
