I love creating tools, software and electronic devices and sharing everything I’ve learned on the way. All my recent projects are hosted on GitHub. Here is what I’m working on now and here are the tools and services I use daily.
WordPress Courses
In 2024 I wrapped my time at an enterprise WordPress agency XWP to create online courses for experienced WordPress developers. I’ve always had a passion for documenting and explaining difficult concepts in a way that people enjoy so I’m now making it available for the wider WordPress community.
Video Blog
On January 1, 2017 I started a video blog about electronics, personal mobility and my software projects.
WordPress Plugins
Storage for Contact Form 7 — stores all Contact Form 7 submissions including attachments in your WordPress dashboard. All form entries and leads will be stored safely even if your e-mail goes down or e-mail messages go missing or get deleted. Release blog post.
Controls for Contact Form 7 — provides advanced controls, analytics & tracking for Contact Form 7. Release blog post.
Widget Context — show or hide widgets conditionally depending on the page, post or section being viewed. Release blog post.
Block Context — show and hide WordPress blocks based on rules and conditions such as user role, date and time.
Gumroad Embed for WordPress automatically converts all links to Gumroad products into active “buy” buttons.
Minit — combines all CSS and Javascript files into one and loads all external scripts asynchronously in the footer. Works only with scripts and styles that are enqueued using wp_enqueue_scripts and wp_enqueue_styles. Release blog post.
Numeric Shortlinks — creates and sets the default WordPress shortlinks for posts and pages to use post ID, i.e. http://example.com/123. Release blog post.
Custom 404 Error Page — specify any static page to be used as the 404 error page. Release blog post.
Widget Output Cache — stores and retrieves widget output from WordPress transients or object cache, if available. Release blog post.
Script Helper — enables fragments of Javascript, CSS or HTML to be added to theme header and footer. Great for tracking scripts that need to be preserved when changing themes. Release blog post.
Multiple Editors — allow multiple editors and contributors per post or page. Also enable contributors and authors to upload files and draft new pages by default.
Code Prettify — automatic code highlighter that uses the Google Code Prettify library (one minified javascript file) which parses all <pre> tags on the page, detects the correct language and lazy-loads the necessary syntax module, and applies the highlighting. Release blog post.
Mobile Redirect — automatically redirect users to the correct version of your site based on their user agent. The only mobile redirect plugin to follow the best practices and suggestions from Google for mobile redirection, including sending proper Vary header, adding meta alternate tags, sending 301 HTTP response, etc. Release blog post.
Simple WordPress Archives — provides a shortcode for displaying an archive of all blog posts grouped by categories. Release blog post.
Feed Image Enclosure — adds featured images as image enclosures to posts in RSS feed. Release blog post.
Discontinued WordPress Plugins:
Checkout Pilot for WooCommerce enables “checkout later” for customers who are not ready to make the purchase right way.
Simple Latest Posts Widget — features a drag-and-drop interface for choosing which elements (title, excerpt, featured image) and in what order to show for a list of latest posts of a specific post type.
Image Filters — creates grayscale thumbnail images of specific size for each uploaded image.
Tabbed Widgets — put any widget into a tabbed interface. Supports accordion and tabbed layout. Release blog post.
Multiple Galleries — allowed to create multiple galleries per post or page using simple checkboxes, before WordPress 3.5. Release blog post.
Tools & Resources
- Quick PGP is a set of bash scripts for quickly encrypting, signing and verifying content copied to your clipboard.
- Photos Sync is a command line PHP script for creating full and organized backups of the original photos and videos in your OS X Photos library.
- Iepirkumi24.lv is a free email newsletter of public tenders in Latvia where users can subscribe to receive free daily emails of new tenders in a specific industry. Powered by WordPress, of course.
Archived Projects
- Maker Feed was a blogroll listing posts from blogs or electronics enthusiasts, makers and creators.
- WProll.com was a WordPress blogroll that features new blogs and people for you to follow in the WordPress community. Read the end of life post.
- Tinystone was hardware design, firmware and management software for Eddystone beacon deployments for the Physical Web.
- Orbiter is a simple and extendable PHP tool for publishing beautiful websites out of plain text Markdown documents.
- Rover is an HTML and Javascript based Markdown text editor that syncs with Dropbox and works perfectly on desktop and mobile browsers. To be used in combination with Orbiter. It is currently being re-written using AngularJS.
- HTML5 Notepad App is a predecessor of Rover, built for trying out local storage and offline features introduced with HTML5.
- Metrogram is a sample slideshow application built with AngularJS that creates a slideshow out of Instagram photos with a specific tag.
- Made in Latvia is a copyright-free logo for labeling all things made in Latvia.