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Sometimes you may need to randomly select items from a list so that some items are selected more frequently than others. For example, you might take a list of applications and their download counts, and randomly pick a “featured application” based on the number of downloads. There are several ways to accomplish this in PHP. […]

Normally you can’t send cross-domain requests in JavaScript due to restrictions imposed by the same-origin security policy. There are many clever hacks that circumvent this by using remote script includes (even CSS includes) or proxy scripts, but so far I haven’t seen anything useful for client-side, cross-domain POST requests. However, it turns out you can […]

Listing recent posts on a WordPress page is easy – there are various widgets and theme functions available just for that purpose. But what about a non-WP page, or even a different site? That’s not that hard either – simply grab some posts from the blog’s RSS feed and output them on your page. In […]

A .torrent file contains assorted metadata that is stored in a “bencoded dictionary” format. Bencoding is a relatively simple cross-platform encoding used by BitTorrent and a dictionary is basically an associative array. You can find a high-level overview of the file structure here. To open or edit a .torrent file in PHP you can either […]

Random script time! Here’s a PHP function that can send messages to any user on a vBulletin forum. I wrote it because somebody asked me if I could help with their code and I figured it would be easier to write it from scratch. Also, I predict it will be useful to more than one […]

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 […]

HTTP redirects usually have the response status 301 or 302 and provide the redirection URL in the “Location” header. I’ve written three complementary PHP functions that you can use to find out where an URL redirects to (based on a helpful thread at WebmasterWorld). You don’t even need CURL for this – fsockopen() will do […]

A PHP class that uses cURL to log in to cPanel. Can create MySQL databases and users, add users to databases, list existing databases, and more.

A simple PHP function that can make TOR switch to a new identity. The script also supports TOR authentication.

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 […]

Two classes that use asynchronous HTTP POST requests to simulate multithreading (works on Windows, too!). The Thread class simulates a single thread of execution, whereas ThreadManager is an utility class that makes handling multiple threads easier.

DeviantArt, with its huge number of artworks and a large userbase, is just the kind of site that could use a good recommendation engine. A recommendation engine is basically a program that analyzes your tastes and recommends some images that you might like. There do not seem to be any official plans to create a recommendation system. So I went ahead and started building my own recommendation engine for DA.

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.

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 […]

Google Image Search doesn’t get as much time in the spotlight as the “normal” Web Search, but it’s still useful for things like finding suitable illustrations for an article (Flickr also comes to mind). Whatever you use it for, you can often get results faster with a bit of automation. Here’s a simple PHP script that can parse and return the results of any Image Search query. For education purposes only.

I decided to put a person name database I found to good use and make a person name generator. Here it is! The generator uses Markov chains. Most of the source code is available for download.

I’ve created a PHP class that can extract the main content parts from a HTML page, stripping away superfluous components like JavaScript blocks, menus, advertisements and so on. The script isn’t 100% effective, but good enough for many practical purposes. It can also serve as a starting point for more complex systems.

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.

The are many reasons why someone might want to detect if users are accessing their site via a proxy. For one, all spammers use proxies. Proxies can also be used to cheat voting systems, create multiple accounts when only one account is allowed or make it appear like the user is browsing from a different […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

If you have a PHP script that takes a while to execute (for example, long database operations or file format conversions), you might want to run it in the background so that the rest of your page still loads fast. In this post I’ll describe two ways to do this. Launching a background process One […]

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 […]

Shoot Yourself in The Foot More Efficiently If you’re unfamiliar with how frameworks function, trying to use a framework for a new project will bring trouble. With all the complexities frameworks bring, new bugs will come, too. Besides, small one-man projects typically don’t require a framework. MVC Isn’t A Framework-exclusive Feature See the bare-bones MVC […]

I’ve noticed that whenever I search for a “php upload script” or “how to upload files”, the first page of Gogle results is full of pages that tell you how to handle file uploads = letting users to upload something to your server. But what if you actually want to create a PHP script that […]

I’ve created an online tool that displays the sites that received the most votes (diggs) during the last 7 days. Features The classic Top 10 list. The huge Top 100 list. Sites ranked by the total number of diggs received on all stories submitted in the last 7 days. Click the “Popular stories” column heading […]

Sometimes it is necessary to verify that a page really contains a specific link. This is usually done when checking for a reciprocal link in link exchange scripts.