WordPress

Update PHP Version For WordPress On Debian 9

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As of April 30, 2020, the current version of Google Cloud Platform’s WordPress Click-to-Deploy deploys WordPress 5.2.3 using PHP version 7.0.33. PHP 7.0.33 was released in January 10, 2019 and since then the PHP developers have released the most recent and stable 7.4.5 version. As a site administrator it is highly essential to update system versions in order to improve both security and performance.

There are many blogs – especially the article from WordPress themselves – which go into details about why updating PHP is important. Since I would be spitting out the exact same details I will not write about it here. However, pages I have visited would simply ask WordPress administrators to contact their webmaster/sysadmins to update the PHP version, which will not fly for an amateur such as myself. In addition, building from source often results in faster performance, so I took on that challenge as well. To serve as future reference, I have created a manual in the process of updating this site from PHP7.0 to PHP7.4.5. Continue on for steps on how to do it yourself!

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Guide To Fade-In Effect On Scroll Into View

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Did you notice this fade-in??

Many of the UI we see today, whether it’s on TV, slideshow presentations, mobile apps and many other kinds of visuals, all incorporate some form of transition to keep the user engaged. A few days ago I was designing a mock e-commerce website for a local business and spent quite some time stuck on how to implement this fade-in effect. While there are a lot of ways to incorporate fade-in effects and there are many webpages showing you how to do so, I’ve found that there are no articles which matched the exact effect I was looking for, and thus I’m putting it here for the sake of documentation and knowledge sharing.

Read on to learn more about how to incorporate fade-in of elements the moment it is partly visible in the viewport.

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Simple Guide to WordPress Permalink

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Update 2023-02-11 : Added an additional check (modify “apache2.conf” file) at the end of the article in the case the existing method doesn’t work.

As I was reviving this site after its two-year hiatus, I noticed that I neglected to post an article detailing how to set up WordPress permalinks. Since it requires some modifications on the server side it took a bit of trial-and-error to re-enable it. If even I could forget how to make the settings after two years, then it is definitely reason enough to make an article out of it (for my own sake!).

Read on to learn more about why and how to set WordPress permalinks.

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JiyuuLife is Live Again!

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Wow, it’s been a while!

While neglecting to publish some new posts due to being busy with work, I also overlooked the fact that after the GCP trial period ends, there is only a 30-day grace period for you to update to non-free status before they TERMINATE your compute VM. This means that while your deployment history and GCP project will still be kept, everything else – including the things you installed/changed on your VM – will be wiped.

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Secure Your WordPress Using HTTPS

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(Update 2020-04-24: About two years after the making of this article, some of the content has changed, specifically regarding software updates for the GCP Click-To-Deploy VM, as well as different prompts from LetsEncrypt. The post has been updated to reflect the changes.)

This is part 3 of a three-part guide to setting up and configuring WordPress hosted on Google Cloud Platform and registered with a Google Domain URL. Readers should make sure their WordPress instance is running and behaving properly using GCP, have WordPress admin access, and registered their custom domain (eg http://www.example.com) before attempting this section.

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Registering Google Domains to Google Cloud WordPress

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This is part 2 of a three-part guide to setting up and configuring WordPress hosted on Google Cloud Platform and registered with a Google Domain URL. Readers should make sure their WordPress instance is running and behaving properly using GCP and have WordPress admin access before attempting this guide. You can read part 1 here.

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How To Deploy WordPress Using Google Cloud Click-to-Deploy

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While considering what to write for my first How-To article, I came to a realization that the entire process for deploying WordPress and getting it to run on a cloud provider with a custom domain is a rather arduous process. While there are many guides scattered around the internet detailing the various stages of setting up, the concept of a holistic, DIY-everything guide is missing – especially if you go into the details of EXACTLY what platforms and services you are using. Therefore, I’d like to write a comprehensive guide for how to deploy a WordPress instance by yourself using Google Cloud, followed by how to register this WordPress to a custom domain hosted by Google Domain. Finally, I will walk you through the steps of SSL verification and having all traffic route via HTTPS for enhanced security.

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