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Jonathan Dingman

Dad, Product Guy, WordPress, SEO, and TailwindCSS.

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  • About Jonathan

Tech

Hey there! Welcome to my tech corner, where I share all the cool stuff I've learned working with some of the best tools out there. Whether it's tweaking Cloudflare settings for optimal performance or leveraging the power of structured data in eCommerce, I've got you covered. Dive into my hands-on experiences and discover tips and tricks to make your tech life easier and more efficient.

Join me as I break down complex tech topics into easy-to-follow guides. From SEO best practices to fun Google Sheets hacks, this is your go-to spot for practical advice and innovative solutions. Let’s explore the tech world together and make the most out of these amazing tools!

100% Free & Simple Full Site Caching at the Edge with Cloudflare

July 24, 2024 by Jonathan Dingman Leave a Comment

I recently started playing around with some of the configuration settings in Cloudflare and I realized something that I could cache the entire site for free at the edge. It’s very simple. Let’s take a look at the configuration settings there are only two caching rules that you need to configure. This works entirely on […]

Filed Under: Tech Tagged With: Cloudflare, Performance, User Experience, WordPress

Leveraging Structured Data Schema.org Markup for Paginated eCommerce Category Pages

July 24, 2024 by Jonathan Dingman 2 Comments

The Importance of Structured Data in eCommerce In the competitive world of eCommerce, visibility and user experience are critical. As someone with years of experience in this field, I’ve learned the importance of structured data, especially schema.org markup, in improving both search engine visibility and user experience. Allow me to share why schema.org markup is […]

Filed Under: Google, Tech, WordPress Tagged With: Google Tag Manager, Schema, SEO, Structured Data

How Accordion UX Impacts SEO: Pros, Cons, and Best Practices

July 12, 2024 by Jonathan Dingman Leave a Comment

Understanding the Impact of Accordion UX on SEO In the ever-evolving landscape of digital marketing, the synergy between user experience (UX) and search engine optimization (SEO) has become a pivotal focus for web designers and marketers alike. As search engines become increasingly sophisticated in how they index and rank content, the importance of providing an […]

Filed Under: Tech Tagged With: SEO

Coloring By Numbers in Google Sheets: Making Zeros Disappear

August 6, 2023 by Jonathan Dingman Leave a Comment

Do you like playing with colors in your drawings? Well, did you know you can also play with colors in Google Sheets, a cool tool you use for things like making lists or adding numbers? Today we’re going to talk about how to make zeros in Google Sheets change color so that they seem to […]

Filed Under: Google, Tech Tagged With: Google, Google Sheets

12 Easy to use Features of Google Analytics

January 21, 2023 by Jonathan Dingman Leave a Comment

Google Analytics is an amazing tool that helps businesses understand their website traffic and customer behavior. It offers detailed insights into how people find and interact with your website. With Google Analytics, you can track website visitors, measure conversions, and gain valuable insights into your web performance. Here are 12 great features of Google Analytics […]

Filed Under: General, Tech Tagged With: Google Analytics

Using Cloudflare, an Amazon Load Balancer, with Nginx and Fail2Ban

February 14, 2020 by Jonathan Dingman 3 Comments

I recently started using WordOps as the primary infrastructure solution for my WordPress sites. I’ve been quite happy with it as well. I’ve been using Cloudflare for quite a while now, and have been extremely pleased with the product offering; even the free service is fantastic — I have also used Cloudflare as an Enterprise […]

Filed Under: Tech Tagged With: AWS, Cloudflare, High Availability, Nginx, WordOps, WordPress, WordPress Infrastructure

How to Automate WordPress Backups to Amazon S3 with a Bash Script

February 13, 2020 by Jonathan Dingman Leave a Comment

I’ve been working with WordPress for almost 20 years now. Hosting has always been a pain in my side to properly handle scaling, caching, and delivery. Recently, I started using an Open Source product called WordOps and have been very impressed with it. The following WordPress backup script is tailored to the file structure of […]

Filed Under: Tech Tagged With: WordOps, WordPress, WordPress Infrastructure

How to Setup a VAST/VPAID Waterfall with VideoJS

August 3, 2017 by Jonathan Dingman

I was recently working on a project that required I setup a VAST/VPAID waterfall within VideoJS, and pass macros to be replaced on runtime to the ad tag. It was pretty tricky to get it working, but after much research, I was able to accomplish it. Here’s how I did it. Setting up VideoJS I first […]

Filed Under: Tech

How to Return an Empty Cell When the Value is Zero in Google Sheets

July 17, 2017 by Jonathan Dingman

If you’re anything like me, you want clean data and don’t want to show anything that may look wrong. In this instance, I have rows of data, but some rows may not have data yet and I want them to be ready for when they do have data. Instead of showing 0 for every field […]

Filed Under: Tech

Augmented Reality. Gaming, Tech, Real Life

October 25, 2016 by Jonathan Dingman

I’ve been casual gamer since I was about 8 years old when I was first introduced to computers. I played a really mean game of Oregon Trail on my Apple II E at school. My first computer had the blazing processing speed of 100mhz. I’ve seen a lot happen both in computers and gaming since […]

Filed Under: Tech

Random Sampling with SQL

June 27, 2016 by Jonathan Dingman

Keep it simple. select * from table1 where criteria1 = TRUE order by random() limit 500 Simple enough to get the job done and pulls a random sampling based on the result set.

Filed Under: Tech

Change the Default Play Button on a Mac to Support 3rd-Party Apps

June 25, 2016 by Jonathan Dingman

Apple’s restrictions over defaults are typically a good thing. They help prevent users from accidentally being misled by something malicious or an attack. However, when someone wants to intentionally change the default to something, say, the default music player, Apple’s controls don’t make it very easy to do. I searched and searched for a way […]

Filed Under: Tech Tagged With: Music

Free up some storage on your Mac with Monolingual

June 16, 2016 by Jonathan Dingman

Getting close to running out of space on your mac? Chances are there are lots and lots of language files cluttering up your computer and using up valuable storage space. Side stage left, enter Monolingual. This nifty (and FREE) app scours through your computer to remove any language files you don’t want. By default, it […]

Filed Under: Tech

How to setup an SSH tunnel to browse the web securely

June 8, 2013 by Jonathan Dingman

SSH tunnel on a Mac

This tutorial is aimed at people using OS X on a Mac, but could easily work for any other operating system. If you have a non-standard SSH port, just add -p to the end of the command. First, I setup this command as a /usr/bin command so I don’t have to remember it. This will […]

Filed Under: Tech

How to Get the Unique Values of a Column in a Google Docs Spreadsheet

June 2, 2013 by Jonathan Dingman

I recently had the need to get all the unique values in cells within a column, by comma delimited. Here’s the function I used: =query(index(unique(trim(transpose(split(join(” “,A1:A&”,”),”,”))))),”select* where Col1 ” “) I put his in B1 and it listed all the unique values from A:A and it automatically updates as you change the data in A:A

Filed Under: Tech

Awesome Bug Tracking and Project Management

August 4, 2011 by Jonathan Dingman

Over the past five years, I’ve used a number of different bug tracking and project management systems for various projects. Bugzilla, Mantis, Trac, Redmine, and now JIRA. Bugzilla was complex to initially setup and felt a bit clunky while using it, so we didn’t use it for very long. We tried Mantis and it just […]

Filed Under: Tech Tagged With: Productivity, Software Reviews

Google+ Feature Suggestions

July 11, 2011 by Jonathan Dingman

Google+ is awesome. But it’s not perfect. This is Google’s first real take at creating their own social network to compete with Facebook and Twitter. Let’s be honest, MySpace isn’t much competition these days. Over the past week, I’ve been seeing things that Google should do to be a better platform. Shorter profile permalinks, ie […]

Filed Under: Tech Tagged With: Facebook, Google, Twitter

Google Plus…It’s So Shiny!

July 7, 2011 by Jonathan Dingman

Google+ is actually pretty awesome. I got my invite just a few days ago and so far, it’s great. What’s so great about it? It’s clean. Even cleaner than Facebook. Let’s rewind back to 2004. Facebook was “TheFacebook.com” and the site required you to be at a college that it had registered on the site. […]

Filed Under: Tech Tagged With: Facebook, Google, Twitter

FileZilla to Cyberduck

May 10, 2011 by Jonathan Dingman

I’ve been a FileZilla user for a few years. I switched over to FileZilla away from Fugu and Cyberduck for reasons I can’t recall. FileZilla has served it’s purpose, despite it’s bi-monthly updates (that get quite annoying.) It’s a simple app, you can connect via FTP, FTP over SSH, and then a few SSL options. […]

Filed Under: Tech Tagged With: Software Reviews

One Reason I Love FiOS

January 28, 2011 by Jonathan Dingman

There’s one major reason I love Verizon FiOS. It’s fast. Really fast. I can get speeds up to 2.8mb/s and that’s simply blazing fast. The TV service we also get is really good. We don’t use the phone line we get through the triple-play package, but the Internet for me is the most important. We […]

Filed Under: Tech

Can’t Like on iTunes Ping

January 25, 2011 by Jonathan Dingman

I’ve been trying out Apple’s iTunes Ping social network, and for the most part..it’s alright. Nothing special beyond the ability to follow your favorite artists and stay up to date with what they’re doing. It’s generally a bad experience because of how sluggish iTunes is (both Mac and Windows). That said, I don’t use it […]

Filed Under: Tech Tagged With: Music

Firefox Extension Roundup (Jan 2011)

January 6, 2011 by Jonathan Dingman

I’ve been thinking about it, and I’d like to start tracking which Firefox extensions I have installed.  I may do some other lists, but I want to start putting out content that shows valuable extensions which I use.

Filed Under: Tech Tagged With: Firefox

The Ultimate Guide to Crafting a Powerful Product Requirements Document (PRD)

July 7, 2010 by Jonathan Dingman Leave a Comment

In the fast-paced world of tech development, having a clear and comprehensive Product Requirements Document (PRD) can make the difference between a successful product launch and a costly misfire. This guide will delve into the essential elements of a PRD, best practices for writing one, and how it can streamline your development process. What is […]

Filed Under: Tech

Show Only Children Pages on Parent Page

August 3, 2009 by Jonathan Dingman

There is still much to be desired within WordPress when it comes to dealing with parent and children pages. The core code is there, and it’s usable, but there’s not a lot “out of the box” to play with. We’ve developed a bit of code to help make your life a little easier. Adding the […]

Filed Under: Tech Tagged With: WordPress

WordPress Tutorial: Using SSH to Install/Upgrade

February 9, 2009 by Jonathan Dingman

This tutorial will guide you step by step on how to setup your server so you can install new plugins and upgrade existing plugins using an SSH2 layer in PHP and WordPress. What is WordPress? WordPress started in 2003 with a single bit of code to enhance the typography of everyday writing and with fewer […]

Filed Under: Tech Tagged With: WordPress

OpenX Advanced Targeting Using WordPress

October 20, 2008 by Jonathan Dingman

What is Openx OpenX is, in my opinion, the most efficient and hands-free open source ad server on the web today. It’s flexible, easy to use, and best of all, free. What is WordPress? WordPress is one of the leading platforms in blogging on the web today. Whether you are self-hosted (using wordpress.org) or being […]

Filed Under: Tech Tagged With: OpenX, WordPress

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Jonathan "Jon" Dingman

Welcome to my little corner of the interwebz!

My name is Jonathan.

Recent Posts

  • [Humor] Giving Excel a September 10th rating.
  • Mastering Alphabetization in Google Sheets: A Step-by-Step Guide
  • 100% Free & Simple Full Site Caching at the Edge with Cloudflare
  • Leveraging Structured Data Schema.org Markup for Paginated eCommerce Category Pages
  • How Accordion UX Impacts SEO: Pros, Cons, and Best Practices
  • How to Create a Dropdown List in Google Sheets
  • Sparklines: The Pocket-Sized Warriors of Google Sheets for Quick Data Insights
  • Google Sheets and Data Analysis: Interpreting Zeroes
  • The Ultimate Guide to Dynamic Drop-Down Lists in Google Sheets
  • Google Sheets Best Practices: Perfecting Data Entry with Advanced Validation Techniques
  • Coloring By Numbers in Google Sheets: Making Zeros Disappear
  • 12 Easy to use Features of Google Analytics
  • Self-hosting WordPress: Looking at WordOps vs SlickStack
  • How I Setup a WordPress Cron Job Using AWS Lambda
  • Using Cloudflare, an Amazon Load Balancer, with Nginx and Fail2Ban
  • How to Automate WordPress Backups to Amazon S3 with a Bash Script
  • How to Track Light/Dark Mode in Google Analytics through Google Tag Manager
  • How to Track Ad Block Usage in Google Analytics through Google Tag Manager
  • How to Setup a VAST/VPAID Waterfall with VideoJS
  • How to Return an Empty Cell When the Value is Zero in Google Sheets

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