W-Shadow.com

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 [...]

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 [...]

A small WordPress plugin that will let you easily edit your username from within WordPress. Useful if you want to change it to something other than admin. The plugin is compatible with any version of WordPress from 2.0 to 2.6.

I’m sure you know why I write this. A new version of WordPress is out, and I’ve upgraded this blog immediately. So here are the mandatory first impressions (nope, I don’t use SVN betas). Just conforming with the unquestionable avalanche of review-style posts that have appeared, with more no doubt being written right now.
Right after [...]

As you might know, when you log in to a WordPress blog a session cookie is created that serves as a kind of authentication “key”. This is what lets you stay logged in and access various areas of the dashboard without having to enter your password every time. However, if a hacker was to get [...]

A simple WordPress plugin that sorts the items in Settings, Plugins and Manage dashboard menus in A-Z order.

A new version of the WordPress plugin, now with an improved FireFox extension, ability to delete themes and some bugfixes. Still updates and installs plugins, too.

I’ve created a simple plugin based on an idea somebody posted on WordPress Extend Ideas -
Right now, when you’re drafting a Wordpress post in WP 2.5.1, the “Save” and “Publish” buttons are right next to each other.
It’s generally a bad thing in user interface heuristics to put a destructive or non-undoable action (such [...]

Here’s another upgrade for the One Click Plugin Updater. Now with even more potentially deadly features!
What’s New
Global update notices (≥ WP 2.5)
Displays an update notification bar on all admin pages when there are new plugin updates available. The update notice will list all available upgrades and include a link to perform them all [...]

This version of the WordPress plugin has a lot of new features, and, quite probably, a lot of new bugs, too. In fact, it’s so experimental it even glows in the dark
The plugin, which I’ve alternatively called “One Click Updater” and “Single Click Updater” in the past (no doubt to confuse everyone, including [...]

Everybody and their animal companion have been writing WP 2.5 reviews ever since RC1 came out. Now that the new version has finally been released “proper”, the temptation to commit the slightly dishonorable act of following the trend and writing my own “first impressions” (or is it “second thoughts”?) post is too strong to overcome. [...]

I’m currently lacking real “bloggable” ideas, so here’s something simple and hopefully useful - a PHP script to get the blog search results from Google. The script is provided strictly for educational purposes, blah blah blah.
And by the way, if you only need the top X results, it would be simpler to use the Blogsearch’s [...]

A while ago I saw the blog version survey at BlogSecurity.net and got an idea to do my own. The previous survey is more than 8 months old and several new WordPress version have been released since then, so I think a new study is in order
I collected a large list of WordPress [...]

I’ve gotten some interesting feature suggestions for my link checker WordPress plugin since I released the last version several months ago. During the last week I finally got around to implementing some of them. Enjoy
What’s New
Making broken links look different
There’s now an option to add a “broken_link” CSS class to known broken links. [...]

It is no secret that the introduction of the rel=nofollow completely failed to stop, or at least decrease link spam on blogs, forums and similar sites. The possible reasons, and the negative effects of Nofollow on legitimate users, have been discussed to death, but still I feel there is one aspect of the problem that has been overlooked.

I’ve started up two longterm projects at the same time (one is top secret linkbait stuff, the other just top secret ), so I don’t have much time/ideas for new posts at the moment. Irrespective of that, there is one plugin that I have been working on and testing for a while - my [...]

Lately I’ve become a bit tired of all the plugin-making, new-feature-adding and programming in general, probably because I’m currently out of exciting and easy to implement ideas. This leads me to finding alternate modes of time-wasting, like obsessing over stats - the RSS subscriber count in particular. And somehow that activity gave me a new idea and made me enthusiastic enough to start work on yet another plugin.

Recently I needed to put some style definitions and a JavaScript function in a post on another blog that I have. I wasted several hours trying to do this, because WordPress insisted on putting backslashes in front of my apostrophes, inserting superfluous <p> or <br /> tags in place of newlines, and generally breaking my HTML in various horrible ways.

In the end I decided to just go and write a plugin that would let me put any code or script in my posts and display it to the visitor unmodified.

Over the last few days I’ve been tweaking my AdSense ads and trying to improve their relevance, with good results - last Sunday was the highest-earning day for this site since… well, since ever. There was no large increase in traffic, so it’s really because of the changes I made. Here are some tips that I figured out from my experimentation…

I recently blogged about my anti-spam experiment (which has been going great!). The one problem with the method I explained in that post is that it requires the user to modify WordPress core files. Editing the source code can be risky and may intimidate non-programmers. Turns out there is a good alternative though - the [...]

I’ve had some of my posts scraped by spam blogs (splogs) in the past. Since I think “legal action” against these sites is not very effective (and I’m lazy, too ), I began wondering if there was some automated way to stop the content thieves. In this post I’ll talk about my findings, starting with simple feed copyrighting and up to advanced techniques that could be used to fight sploggers.

For months I’ve been getting dozens of spam comments, sometimes over a hundred per day. Most of them are caught by Akismet, which is great. The problem is that with high numbers of spam comments it’s virtually impossible to look through the spam filter logs and de-spam false positives. The bandwidth and processing power wasted [...]

We have spam filters, okay, but what about stupidity filters? Surely there is a way to automatically distinguish between the “LOOOL u SUcK” junk and intelligent discourse? - that’s what the authors of StupidFilter must have thought when starting up the project. A new program for catching - not spam, but obtuse - comments is being developed. Might have other uses, too.

I’ve been following WP plugin development-related news for a week or two now, and I’ve noticed something that could make creating a plugin easier - plugin generators. These tools can create a handy template for your new plugin so you don’t need to start completely from scratch; you still need to know (at least) PHP to make your plugin do anything useful, though. In this post I’ll review three WordPress plugin generators I’ve come across.

I’ve added a new feature to my single-click WorPress plugin updater - now you can see which of your plugins are checked for updates. Those plugins that have update notifications enabled will be marked by a golden bar-thingy in the “Plugins” tab. This is useful to see which plugins will notify you when an update [...]

About two weeks ago I was browsing SEO-related sites and came upon a promising technique for getting one’s pages out of the supplemental index. It’s called “third level push” and looks particularily useful for blogs. This is an advanced technique and you should work on the basic stuff first before trying something like this.

Instead of a detailed tutorial I will offer some thoughts about the “third level push” method and some tips on implementing it (yes, this is going to be a long post).

This plugin extends the plugin update notification feature introduced in WordPress 2.3 by adding an “update automatically” link to update notifications. When you click the link, the new version of the corresponding plugin is downloaded and installed automatically. It also lets you know which plugins have update notifications enabled.
Update 06.04.2008 : Version 2.0.1 with much [...]

Everybody gets email spam. Bloggers also get comment spam and trackback spam (lucky us). This blog receives a few dozen spam comments a day (most are caught by Akismet).
What most people don’t realize is comment spam can actually be useful. Here’s how (note: includes some unethical stuff) -

Fresh proxies. Typically spammers use a proxy when [...]

The Broken Link Checker Wordpress plugin has been updated to version 0.2! Here’s what’s new -

Link checking algorithm has been improved and shouldn’t generate false warnings anymore.
Links that are discovered to not work will be re-checked again a few minutes later. This is useful if the link only appeared to be broken due to a [...]

Not long ago I wrote about several interesting Wordpress plugins and mentioned that the admin drop down menu plugin wasn’t as easy to use as I’d like it to be. I considered writing a better one, but luckily I decided to check Google before commiting to that. Sure enough, there are others admin menu enhancements [...]