W-Shadow.com

I discovered this interesting PHP class today that can be used to process all kinds of .ico files in PHP.
Features

Read/write icon files.
Extract individual icons from a multi-icon file as GD icon resources.
Add new icons to an .ico file.
Supports all icon image sizes, bit depths and transparency.

You can find the source code on PHPClasses.org (you’ll need [...]

I’ve created a plugin for WordPress that can cloak outgoing links in your posts and/or pages.
Features

Choose what to cloak – all links, only the links you specify or no links at all.
Choose where to cloak – posts, pages or both.
Configure the URL – you can set the “prefix” part of the URL (see examples below).
Exception [...]

Not “cool” like “the concept of web 2.0 posesses a large amount of coolness” or “web20.cool == true“. For many people Web 2.0 equals “cool”. That’s what I understood after reading this fine blog post.
Programmers and the like might know Web 2.0 is about things like AJAX, social networking, “folksonomies” et cetera. Some might even [...]

The 3 Easy Steps

Create an application
It doesn’t have to be anything special. One way is to find a free screensaver builder and use a bunch of royalty-free photos to make your own slideshow screensaver. Make the application freeware – it’s easier and faster. If you actually create something worthy, you might set up a vendor [...]

I’ve seen people asking on the Internet if there’s a way to get a list of the most bookmarked pages from a specific site. Some other social bookmarking services (like Digg) have this feature but del.icio.us doesn’t. This looked like an interesting problem so I decided to write a script that would crawl a given [...]

What would you do if you wanted to run several instances of a PHP script that each work on a portion of a MySQL table, without interfering with each other and trying to grab the same rows? I don’t know the correct answer to this, but here’s what I did. It’s a rant, yeah.

A PHP function that extracts all URLs from a page and another one that translates a relative URL to absolute URL. Originally I wrote this for a crawler script.

If you’ve ever written a server-side script intended for distribution (as opposed to personal use), you’ve probably encountered the problem of needing to write a tutorial detailing the installation and setting up of the script. There are several typical tasks that you might need to describe – setting file permissions, creating a database, etc.
Don’t [...]

This is an example of how you can use CURL to “log in” and retrieve some protected info. I’ve showed the somewhat extreme case where you need to maintain cookies, spoof HTTP referer and use SSL. The example page used here is ClickBank – one of the largest digital product retailers. I’ve tried to comment [...]

No response from Squidoo about my countdown module yet, so I’m going to write about some problems I encoutered with the Module Development Kit. This is going to be technical and Squidoo-specific, so beware.
A bit of background : Squidoo offers a SDK for module development. This SDK (or MDK as it’s called) comes with some [...]

Recently I decided to take a look at Squidoo and almost immediately I noticed they offered a Module Development Kit. After checking out the list of “Most Wanted” modules it seems a countdown module is a fairly popular idea and should be easy enough to do. A countdown module would basically “count down” to a [...]