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I’ve made a site that shows actions and filters executed during different WordPress requests. Why? When I’m writing a plugin, I sometimes need to know not just what a hook does, but also when it runs in relation to other hooks. The official WordPress documentation has a list of common actions, but it’s out of […]

Plugin Compatibility Reporter is a WordPress plugin that enables you report if the plugins that you’re using are working properly. It integrates with the compatibility reporting features of the official WordPress.org plugin directory, and lets you mark plugins as “working” or “broken” from within your WordPress dashboard. It also tracks how long each plugin has […]

After a long delay, a new version of my PluginUpdateChecker library is finally ready for release. Read on to find out what’s new, or go straight to the download page. For those of you not familiar with this library, here’s a short summary: You can use it to add automatic update support to any WordPress plugin. Especially […]

I had some free time this weekend, so I built an automatically updated list of Top 100 WordPress plugin developers. The rankings are based on the number of times each developers’ plugins have been downloaded from the WordPress.org plugin directory. A short PHP script updates the list several times per day. Check it out. Bonus: Compare […]

tldextract.php is a PHP library that accurately extracts the effective top-level domain name, registered domain and subdomains from a URL. For example, you can use it to get the domain name “google” from “http://www.google.com”, or the TLD “co.uk” from “http://www.bbc.co.uk/”. Example: Introduction Most people try to do this by splitting the domain name on ‘.’ […]

A few days ago, I happened upon an interesting post on the ManageWP blog discussing ways to improve the WordPress plugin repository. One of the suggestions was to add a “related plugins” feature: Both Lester Chan, with over 7 million plugin downloads to his name, and Duane Storey, a co-founder of Brave New Code, suggested […]

Whether you’re using WordPress for development or simply as a blog or CMS, it is always a good idea to keep an eye on your PHP error log. As a developer, it helps you notice and fix errors in your code. As a normal user, it lets you discover plugin bugs, WordPress compatibility issues and […]

It’s time for another WordPress plugin development tutorial 🙂 In this post, I will provide a step-by-step explanation of how to create a WordPress plugin that lets the user add an automatically generated table of contents (TOC) to their posts by using a simple shortcode. The completed plugin will support the following syntax: For example, […]

Redis Object Cache is a WordPress plugin that provides a persistent, Redis-based backend for the WordPress object cache. Use it if you want to speed up your site and prefer Redis to other key-value stores. Fair warning: If you’re not sure what Redis is and are just looking for ways to improve your site’s performance, you’ll […]

I wanted to familiarize myself with the much-touted canvas element, so I used it to build an interactive celtic knot generator/editor. Give it a try. Launch the celtic knot generator. Note: Requires a fairly modern browser. Instructions When you first load up the knot generator, you will see a 10×10 grid filled with the default […]

Update 2017-06-20: This library has been deprecated. Please use PUC instead. It’s more current and it supports both themes and plugins. This is a PHP library that lets you add automatic update notifications and single-click updates to any WordPress theme. It’s purpose is to be easy to integrate for developers and to provide a familiar […]

Here’s something I’ve been working on for the last month or so: FindBroken.com. It’s an automated link checker that periodically scans your site for broken links and alerts you by email if any are found. Basically, it’s like a hosted version of the Broken Link Checker plugin, only simpler and not WordPress-specific. The site is […]

In my previous post, The Quest For Speed, I mentioned that lazy-loading avatars is a good way to improve your site performance: The overwhelming majority of visitors never leave a comment. Chances are, most don’t even scroll down to the comments section. So why waste their time and bandwidth by loading avatars that they’ll never […]

Tor AutoSwitcher is a free utility that automatically switches Tor  to a new identity every 10 minutes. The time interval is configurable. In case you’re wondering what the hell “Tor“ is and why would anyone care about “switching” their identity, here’s a relevant quote from the Tor article Wikipedia: Tor is a system intended to […]

This is an experimental, physics-based game prototype that I wrote in two weeks. It didn’t come out quite the way I hoped it would, but it might still give you a couple minutes of fun. About The Game Objective Collect as many points as you can by destroying enemies. Detailed description You control a small […]

I’m not a game developer, but, as most programmers do, I’ve always had some interest in the field. The first game that I wrote back in gymnasium was a two-player version of Snake. Written from scratch in Turbo Pascal 7, it featured such innovative design decisions as a completely text- and number-less HUD (I couldn’t […]

Last updated on June 26, 2015. Since time immemorial, only plugins hosted in the official WordPress.org plugin directory have supported automatic updates. Now, I’ve written a PHP library that you can use to add automatic update capabilities to any plugin. Public, private and commercial plugins alike – all can now enjoy the benefits of automatic […]

micro-tweet is an ultra-minimalist Twitter client that fits in a tweet. It can only do two things – display your friends tweets (one at a time) and post new tweets. It’s written in Python and works entirely from the command line. Source Code The source code of micro-tweet is exactly 137 characters, which is short […]

Sometimes it seems that not a month goes by without another “Pure CSS Something” project. Most recently, it was the Pure CSS Twitter “Fail Whale” page that has been making the rounds on Twitter and social news sites for the last few days. Before that, we had the Opera logo made in CSS, and many, […]

I love bookmarklets. Over time, I have accumulated a sizable collection of bookmarklets ranging from development tools (yay for ReCSS!) to great little utilities like Readability. Chances are that some of you have, too. I also like to keep my browser window trim and slim, and a crowded bookmark bar is definitely not conducive to […]

The WordPress.org plugin directory has a neat rating system that lets users rate plugins both on overall quality and on compatibility with specific WP versions. However, its usefulness is stymied by poor integration with WordPress itself. To try to remedy that, I’ve created a plugin that lets you vote on plugins directly from your Dashboard. […]

If you right-click the address bar in Google Chrome, you’ll get a pop-up menu that contains, among other things, a “Paste and go” option. This handy feature lets you paste a URL from the clipboard and navigate to it in one swift motion. However, Chrome doesn’t have a built-in keyboard shortcut for this feature. So […]

As you might have noticed, the query suggestion feature of Google Search usually only comes up when someone wants to expose and make fun of all the silly things that people search for. Today, I’m going to show you how you that it can also be put to a more practical use – keyword discovery! […]

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 […]

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 […]

In a recent Reddit thread, one commenter made a casual remark : There needs to be a way to link to a page on Reddit and automatically apply Readability. That seemed like an excellent idea to me. In case you haven’t heard about it yet, Readability is a bookmarklet that can take an article or […]

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 […]

WordPress automatically checks for plugin, theme and core updates once every 12 hours. This is normally fine, but it can become annoying when you know there’s an important update or bugfix available yet it won’t show up in your Dashboard until the next time WP gets around to checking for it. Of course, you can […]