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Have you ever wondered how all those “falling sand” games work under the hood? If so, read on. Today I will discuss one of the possible ways how you could implement the “falling” part of the game – sand particles falling under the effects of gravity, water (or other liquids) flowing down a hillside, and […]

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, […]

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 […]

WordPress.org has an Ideas section where users can post their suggestions for new WordPress features and comment on ideas posted by other users. If you’re a plugin developer or just someone who blogs about WP, this page is a good place to look for new… well, ideas. It doesn’t have an RSS feed though, so […]

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 […]

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 : […]

When inserting an image into a post, WordPress lets you choose an alignment (left/right/center/none) and even add a caption. This usually works well when viewing the post on the blog itself, but will often look messed-up in the RSS feed. Basically, the image becomes unaligned and breaks the intended post layout. I’ve found an easy […]

Admin Menu Editor is 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. Features Sort menu items any way you want by simple drag & drop. Move a menu item to a different submenu via cut & paste. Edit […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 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 […]

Last.fm does not have out-of-the-box support for global hotkeys, so I created a simple tool that will let you control the Last.fm for Windows app through global hotkeys. Download it here.

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.

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.

I thought it would be handy if I could get the various DA notifications (deviantWATCH, new comments on your deviations, etc) as a RSS feed, so I created a PHP script that can log into a DA account and generate the feed. It creates three feeds – New deviations from your deviantWATCH (with thumbnails!). Messages […]

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 […]

I’ve written a simple text summarizer that can find the most important sentences in any given (English) text and produce a summary of the specified length. It would be pretty easy to adapt the PHP script to other languages, too.