Category Archives: My WP Plugins

Posts relating to plugins written by me for WP, click the link further up for the plugins

How I Stopped 99.9% Of Spam From Even Being Posted

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I’ve just released Disable Trackbacks, a plugin I’ve been using for a while now.

The vast, vast majority of pings sent from other sites are done via pingbacks, not via the old trackback system (I think I’ve gotten like 3 legitimate ones this year or something). However, spammers just love them to death and is pretty much the only ping system they use. So, I wrote this plugin a week or so ago and enabled it on my blog. I’ve gone from a few thousand spams a day to next 0-5 a day. A worthy tradeoff if you ask me (ignoring the couple legitimate ones a year to avoid literally hundreds of thousands of spams).

I also run Cookies For Comments to avoid regular comment spam. In order to post a cookie comment on my site, you must have stylesheets and cookies enabled. Since this is a personal website that isn’t mission critical, I can make that requirement.

Finally Defensio picks up any spams that make it though which are mainly pingbacks from spam blogs (aka splogs).

Spam problem solved, at least for now…

Viper’s Video Quicktags v6.0.0 Released!

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Yes, that’s right — 1-2 months, 3200+ lines of code, and countless cans of Dr. Pepper later, the new version of Viper’s Video Quicktags has been released!

It’s a complete recode literally from scratch (essentially no old code was used) and is incredibly more powerful and feature filled than before.

The only way to really see all the new features is to try it yourself, but here’s a taste of it:

New Plugin: Regenerate Thumbnails

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A client needed a way to regenerate all thumbnails for their uploads, so I threw together a plugin to do that in just one click and a helpful interface.

Post Feature Requests For Viper’s Video Quicktags 6 Here!

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I’m in the process on recoding Viper’s Video Quicktags and am looking for input.

If there’s a feature or a video site that you would like to see supported in the next version, the comments section of this post is the place to post it. Please note that in order for a video website to be supported, the URL in your address bar must have something in common with the embed code. What I mean is the URL can’t be this:

http://videosite.com/videos/my-cool-video/

while the embed HTML looks like this:

<object width="400" height="300"><param name="movie" value="http://embed.videosite.com/files/52asdf7f43j753v32465" /></object>

Notice that there is no way for my plugin to figure out the embed ID from the video’s URL.

Perhaps in a future version I’ll add the ability for you to paste in the HTML embed code and the Javascript powered button will figure out the video ID before inserting it into the post (just inserting the HTML itself into the post would defeat the purpose of this plugin), but not for now.

Oh, and here’s a sneak preview of my work in progress configuration screen:

Viper's Video Quicktags v6 - YouTube Config Screen Preview

New Plugin: jQuery Lightbox For Native Galleries

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jQuery Lightbox For Native Galleries makes your [gallery]‘s use Lightbox to show the fullsize images. Users can now browse the fullsize images without leaving the page.

It was written after a I got a request by Wendy© for such a thing on my Direct Image URLs For Galleries plugin which itself was the starting point for this new plugin.

Here’s a demo:

Images by Microsoft

Two More Minor Plugins Released

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More stuff I wrote randomly that I’m releasing publicly for the hell of it.

  • Disable Theme Preview — while the theme preview feature added in WordPress 2.6 is definitely cool, I find it rather annoying on my blogs. This is because I already know what the themes look like but am just needing to quickly switch the theme. So, this plugin gracefully disables it.
  • Direct Image URLs For Galleries — makes it so when you click on the thumbnail in the output of a , it takes you directly to the fullsize image rather than a page containing the medium size image.

Also now available on WordPress.org: More To The Top

Dashboard Widget Manager’s Dash Editor Broken

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Seems WordPress 2.6 reworked the CSS and such for the widgets page in order to fix the issues that had been occurring with widgets not dropping into the right order. However that means the widget editor screen of my plugin is now broken and it was now just pointed out to me.

I’ll try to update as soon as I can and eventually see if I can just resort to making it so you edit the dashboard via Design -> Widgets like I should have done in the first place.

WordPress Admin Bar v3.0.0 Released — Recoded From Scratch

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I’ve just released the latest version of WordPress Admin Bar. The new version features themes, the ability to hide items, and much, much more!

WordPress theme developers: please consider bundling your own custom admin bar theme with your WordPress theme. It’s a much slicker experience if the admin bar matches the theme. For details, check out the plugin’s theme API. It’s just a single function call and then some CSS.