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A lot of people paste rsync -avz –delete into a deploy script and move on without ever unpacking what each letter means. It works, so there’s rarely a reason to stop and ask. But understanding what each flag actually instructs the command to do makes it much easier to reason about exactly how far –delete reaches, and why the other flags are there in the first place. This post breaks down the main options and shows how they’re actually used in a real theme deployment. Note: rsync (“remote sync”) is a file-synchronization tool that compares source and destination and transfers only what has changed. Unlike a plain copy, it uses …

When people talk about backup strategy, the “3-2-1 rule” comes up often: three copies of your data, on two different types of media, with one copy stored offsite. It’s a catchy sequence of numbers, but few people stop to unpack what each digit is actually protecting against. This post breaks down where the rule comes from and how it maps onto a real backup implementation. Note: The 3-2-1 rule is widely attributed to photographer Peter Krogh. It isn’t a formal standard set by any single organization — it’s a rule of thumb that spread through practical experience. What each number protects The rule bundles three separate conditions: Number What it …

WordPress site maintenance constantly involves one basic question: after an update, is the site still working? Instead of relying on a human eyeballing a page and deciding “looks fine,” most tooling answers that question mechanically, using the three-digit HTTP status code a web server returns for every request. That single number carries more information than it looks like at first glance. Note: An HTTP status code is a three-digit number a web server always attaches to its response to a client (a browser or a program). It comes paired with a short phrase describing what it means, like 200 OK. The leading digit sets the broad category The hundreds digit …

A WordPress URL like https://example.com/blog/some-post-title/ looks clean, but there’s no directory or file on the server that actually matches that path. Behind the scenes, Apache’s mod_rewrite module intercepts the request and silently forwards it to index.php. The rules that make this happen live in .htaccess, and when a WordPress site suddenly starts throwing 404s or 500s for no obvious reason, the cause is very often a misread rule in that file. Note: .htaccess is a configuration file Apache reads on a per-directory basis. On shared hosting environments where you can’t edit the server’s global configuration directly, dropping this file into a directory is often the only way to change how …

Ask most people where WordPress settings live, and they’ll point to the admin dashboard’s Settings menu. But a specific category of settings — the ones that determine how the site starts up in the first place — don’t live there at all. They’re written directly into a PHP file called wp-config.php, using define(). There’s a reason for that split. Dashboard settings are stored in the database (the wp_options table) and get read only after WordPress itself has finished booting. wp-config.php, on the other hand — which also holds the database connection details — is read before WordPress boots. So anything that shapes the boot-time conditions themselves — where the database …

Parts of WordPress that look like they’re reading straight from the database are often actually going through an HTTP API behind the scenes. Loading a post list dynamically with JavaScript, or having an external PHP script pull “just the titles and excerpts of the latest three posts” — both of these can be done without touching SQL directly, by calling the REST API that ships with WordPress itself. Understanding this means that whenever you need one system to peek into another WordPress site’s content, you don’t have to install a plugin or scrape the admin screen to do it. Note: REST (Representational State Transfer) is an API design style where …