W-Shadow.com

Some time ago I created a WordPress plugin that can cloak affiliate links automatically. Today I’m releasing a new version, with all-new feature(s)! The main improvement I’ve implemented is “static link cloaking”. The previous version of the plugin could only cloak links that you’ve actually used in a post, which is inconvenient if you want […]

PHP doesn’t really support multi-threading per se but there are ways to do “fake” multithreading. Here’s one I saw in the PHPClasses.org newsletter – Multi-thread Simulation. Note that this class is intedend for use on a webserver, as opposed to running PHP scripts from a command line (or similar). Check the end of this post […]

Say you want a PHP script that will make the browser to download a file instead of opening it. This is useful for common filetypes that would normally be displayed in a browser, like .html, images, PDFs and .doc files. You can find a lot of scripts that do this on the web but one […]

Notice: This plugin has been transferred to ManageWP. I am no longer working on it. Please direct any feedback to the new developer. See the plugin homepage for more information. Sometimes, links get broken. A page is deleted, a subdirectory forgotten, a site moved to a different domain. Most likely many of your blog posts […]

Here’s a relatively simple PHP function that will check if an URL really leads to a valid page (as opposed to generating “404 Not Found” or some other kind of error). It uses the CURL library – if your server doesn’t have it installed, see “Alternatives” at the end of this post. This script may […]

I discovered this interesting PHP class today that can be used to process all kinds of .ico files in PHP. Features Read/write icon files. Extract individual icons from a multi-icon file as GD icon resources. Add new icons to an .ico file. Supports all icon image sizes, bit depths and transparency. You can find the […]

This is a plugin for WordPress that can automatically cloak outgoing links in your posts and/or pages. Download plugin (Note: May not be compatible with the latest version of Eclipse Link Cloaker.) Features Choose what to cloak – all links, only the links you specify or no links at all. Choose where to cloak – […]

I’ve seen people asking on the Internet if there’s a way to get a list of the most bookmarked pages from a specific site. Some other social bookmarking services (like Digg) have this feature but del.icio.us doesn’t. This looked like an interesting problem so I decided to write a script that would crawl a given […]

What would you do if you wanted to run several instances of a PHP script that each work on a portion of a MySQL table, without interfering with each other and trying to grab the same rows? I don’t know the correct answer to this, but here’s what I did. It’s a rant, yeah.

A PHP function that extracts all URLs from a page and another one that translates a relative URL to absolute URL. Originally I wrote this for a crawler script.

This is an example of how you can use CURL to “log in” and retrieve some protected info. I’ve showed the somewhat extreme case where you need to maintain cookies, spoof HTTP referer and use SSL. The example page used here is ClickBank – one of the largest digital product retailers. I’ve tried to comment […]

No response from Squidoo about my countdown module yet, so I’m going to write about some problems I encoutered with the Module Development Kit. This is going to be technical and Squidoo-specific, so beware. A bit of background : Squidoo offers a SDK for module development. This SDK (or MDK as it’s called) comes with […]

Recently I decided to take a look at Squidoo and almost immediately I noticed they offered a Module Development Kit. After checking out the list of “Most Wanted” modules it seems a countdown module is a fairly popular idea and should be easy enough to do. A countdown module would basically “count down” to a […]