W-Shadow.com

I recently stumbled upon a great jQuery plugin called “timeago” that lets you easily create fuzzy timestamps (e.g. “5 minutes ago”, “about 2 months ago”, etc). So I wrote a quickie WP plugin that you can use to add this neat feature to your blog.
About
Basically, with this plugin you can insert a little piece of [...]

There are two things that I do every morning, right after turning on the computer. First, I read the latest strip of Schlock Mercenary. Then I check my Google AdSense earnings for the previous day. It’s the perfect mix of business and pleasure, and a great way to start a new day.
But enough about my [...]

A week ago, Google introduced real-time search – a new feature that displays live updates from sites like Twitter and FriendFeed as part of the normal search results. Reactions were generally positive, but, as multiple users noted, there was one thing missing – an “off” button. You could pause the live updates, but not get [...]

Deframe is a Greasemonkey script that can remove frames and toolbars from (almost) any website. For example, it can remove the StumbleUpon toolbar that’s displayed on all su.pr links, get rid of the Ow.ly bar, bust the frames that some link sharing sites use on outgoing links, and so on. Deframe supports most frame-based websites [...]

Newslight is a Greasemonkey script that you can use to automatically highlight new posts, new blog comments, recent product listings or any other kind of new content that has been added to your favourite website(s) since you last visited.
The way it works is simple : when you see a web page you’d like to keep [...]

Last week I couldn’t use my regular dev. machine (broken graphics card), so all my WordPress-related plans were on hold. To pass the time, I built a simple water simulation in Processing. Today I’m going to show you this little application and explain how it works. Online demo and source code are included.
Big Words, or [...]

A few months ago, WordPress.org introduced a new feature available to plugins hosted in the Plugin Directory – changelogs. Having an easily accessible changelog is certainly a usability plus, but I felt it created unnecessary work for plugin developers. Personally, I usually provide meaningful log messages (example) when uploading a new version of a plugin [...]

Minecraft is a huge waste of time. By which I mean, of course, that it’s a hugely addictive browser-based multiplayer game (see my mini-review) that makes people stay up till 5 AM every daycycle just so they can finish the latest megaproject.
But if we’re wasting time we should at least waste it efficiently, right? [...]

AutoPagerize for Opera is a userscript that will automatically load the next page of a website inline when you reach the end of a page. This makes browsing paged search results or multi-page articles much more seamless as you don’t need to click “Next” all the time. The full version of the script supports hundreds [...]

Highlight Search Terms is a WordPress plugin that can highlight search terms on your blog’s search page. The plugin is based on a tutorial by Thaya Kareeson, but it also includes several additional features not present in the tutorial and better browser compatibility.
Features

Multiple colors : Each word of the search query is higlighted in a [...]

The Web is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to … oops, wrong reference.
Still, the Web really is huge, and in addition to all the well-designed and accessible sites you use every day (right?), there are also [...]

Don’t you hate it when programs hang or crash? I find it especially annoying when a background application like an IM client or a bandwidth monitor silently crashes – sometimes I only notice the problem hours later when I’ve already missed a bunch of messages. I’m sure you’ve encountered a few “Not responding” errors and [...]

Imagine you are a systems administrator at a major ISP. The company’s servers log every page your clients visit, and due to your position you have full and unrestricted access to those logs. This comes in handy when troubleshooting network problems, but nobody would find out if you browsed somebody’s web history for other reasons [...]

Here’s a little mashup I created over the weekend – a song lyrics tag cloud, built from any user’s “Top Tracks” on Last.fm. You can select the time period, the number of tags to show and the sort order (alphabetic, random or by frequency).
For example, here’s one I made for my Last.fm account :

.ws_tag { [...]

Recently I ran into a situation where I needed to convert some relatively obscure archive files (e.g. RAR) to the ZIP format. That’s easy enough if you only need to deal with a single file – just extract it using your favorite archiver and re-compress the extracted files as .zip.
However, manually converting dozens of [...]

Here is my latest and hack-iest plugin yet – Admin Menu Editor. It’s a WordPress plugin that will let you manually edit the Dashboard menu. You can reorder the menus, show/hide specific items, change access rights, and more. The plugin is still a bit rough around the edges, so a good understading of WP internals [...]

As I write this, WordPress 2.7 is due to arrive in a few days. Now that’s very shiny and all, but there’s one thing that has always made me a bit wary about upgrading to a new version : plugin compatibility. When you have a lot of active plugins there’s always a chance that one [...]

This plugin lets you specify IP addresses or hosts that users are allowed to login from. You can either use full IPs (e.g. “12.34.56.7″) or partial IPs (e.g. “12.34″), which lets you specify a range of addresses. More advanced configuration is also possible – you can specify allowed subnet(s) via network/netmask and use IPv6 addresses, [...]

The upcoming WordPress 2.7 will include a “favorite actions” feature – a dropdown menu that is supposed to contain quick links for easy access to select dashboard pages. The dropdown starts out with a few preset links, and new links can be added by plugins.
Power To The Users
I think it would make more sense to [...]

WP Super Cache is an excellent caching plugin, but sometimes it seems to have problems with deleting expired files. For example, even though this site typically gets at least 3000 pageviews per day, and I’ve set WP Super Cache to delete expired files every 1000 requests (the lowest setting), the expired files tend to accumulate. [...]

A plugin that will scan the WordPress menu structure and attempt to locate the configuration page for each of the active plugins, and add a “Settings” link to the plugin’s row – right besides the “Deactivate” and “Edit” links. The plugin is also smart enough to skip this for plugins that have already added the configuration link on their own (in most cases).

Have you ever tried to rickroll your friends and/or coworkers, but were thwarted by their unexplainable mistrust of the YouTube links you sent them? If your answer is “yes” then you are a very evil person… and I’ve got just the addon for you!
“Eternal Rickroll” is a Firefox extension that, once installed, will automatically replace [...]

Some time ago I made a Firefox extension that would let you easily search any site you had open. The addon, while not hugely popular, has received some favorable comments and is still actively used by some.
Today someone who identified hirself simply as nettrotter submitted a bookmarklet that does the same thing. The bookmarklet [...]

It’s a plugin that measures the performance of other plugins. Well, at least in theory. After several days of intermittent and furious development the plugin is more of a glorified hack, or rather an amalgam of hacks, that provides a myriad of details and slightly-inaccurate summaries about the inner workings of WordPress and its plugins. [...]

Comment Moderation Feed is a small WordPress plugin that creates a RSS 2.0 feed of comments awaiting moderation on your blog. The feeds is similar to other comment feeds offered by WP, but it also includes additional information about the comment author (like email and IP address) and quick links that let you approve, mark as spam or delete a comment.

During the last week I have ported (more or less) the famous SEO for Firefox addon to Opera. Now die-hard Opera fans can also enjoy it’s excellent market research capabilities and enhanced Google/Yahoo! search results
In case you’re not familiar with this outstanding SEO tool check out the “Features” section below.
Download & Installation [...]

I’ve seen this question a few times on various Linux forums – how do you play FLV files (AKA Flash video) on Linux? – so I figured I’d write up a short post about my favorite Linux FLV player. As you would expect, it’s open source and it can also handle lots of video formats [...]

The soulless hulk of Progress trudges on…
I’ve ranted before about how the One Click Plugin Updater is slowly becoming obsolete now that WordPress has an automatic upgrade feature built into it’s core, but OCPU is still the most popular plugin I’ve ever released, so I continue updating it and fixing bugs. Anyway, it still has [...]

I have created a PHP/JS script that will let you enter a list of sites and use the Google tool to analyze the sites and generate a list of related websites – a kind of recommendation engine. For example, if you enter a webcomic site A you will probably get a list of other webcomics B, C and D that are also enjoyed by people who read webcomic A.

There’s a useful script that you can use to reset your WordPress admin password if you have forgotten it and the “normal” password recovery methods – e.g. using the “Lost your password?” link on the login page – don’t seem to work. It’s a standalone script (not a plugin) and doesn’t require you to be [...]