WordPress Tutorial: Creating Option Pages

I just finished making a tutorial on creating options pages and letting your plugins be configurable. It bases the example plugin off of Mark Jaquith’s video tutorial. (It also teaches a bit about register_activation_hook, because that is an important part for making plugins configurable.)Hopefully I’ll get around to making a video-version of this plugin soon, so things are more easy to understand.

But for now, there are still two versions available: A PDF version and the original OpenOffice ODT file.

Enjoy!

WordPress Plugin: TextMe

Are you constantly on the go, and worrying about what’s happening at your blog while you are not there to check up on it? Not to worry! With the new TextMe plugin, you can have a carbon-copy of all admin emails sent via SMS to your cell phone. TextMe supports sending SMS via most major carriers.

See the plugin page for more information.

WordPress Plugin Requests / Suggestions

I have nothing to do, and my brain is out of ideas for WordPress plugins now that I finished the Digg Protector. Does anyone have any requests for a plugin to be made? I can’t make anything too fancy, as I’m still trying to get the hang of all this, but I’ll try my best. Please, someone give me something to do!

WordPress Plugin—Digg Protector

I’ve heard various complaints from blog-owners that when their posts are Digged, their servers’ load increases for the worse. After a bit of study, I’ve found that most of this load is caused by the extreme amount of images that are loaded. The Digg Protector will determine if a visitor is from Digg, and if the visitor is indeed from Digg, the plugin will serve them a remotely-hosted version of the image. Otherwise, the plugin will serve the locally-hosted (on that server) image.

gEdit Template Plugin :: Basic Templates

Eckhard Jäger released a plugin for gEdit last Monday which allowed you to create your own templates, and then create files from those templates. I really liked the idea of this plugin, so I’m going to help it out a bit. Here is a quick archive of a few useful templates for web developers.

SQL Injection :: What It Is, And How To Prevent It

This was originally posted by me at </dream.in.code>. (link)

SQL Injection is a form of hacking that has taken down innumerable amounts of websites, and it’s no comforting idea that your site could be next. In this tutorial, I will give you a brief synopsis of what SQL Injection really is, and how to protect your website from it. This tutorial assumes that you have a fairly good knowledge of PHP, you understand GET and POST methods, and you have used and at least partly understand SQL.

Firefox 3 Beta Release (Candidate)

Firefox 3 Beta 1 has now been officially released. You can download the beta here, in a lot of different languages. You can still view some screenshots below if you would like.

A new article has just sprung up on Digg, giving a few links to an early release of Firefox 3 Beta. It’s really actually a release candidate, so that Digg article isn’t completely valid. But anyway, I’ll give a rundown of the new Firefox, and the main new features I can see after 2 or 3 minutes of playing with it…

Celsus Software

Well, under my new programming ‘alias’ I have launched a site called Celsus Software. I’m currently offering FREE software development, only under the condition that you abide by the terms of service. But they’re not very restrictive, so don’t worry about that

For anyone that is interested in requesting, here’s a direct link to the request page.

DUO Client Screenshots

Here are some screenshots of the .DUO client from my computer, just to give you an idea of what it will look like. Very simple GUI, but it’s functional

(more coming soon)

The DUO-Compress Method

Okay, this may seem a bit silly, but I think it will work.

The duo-compress method archives a file two times before it is finished. This is how it is done chronologically:

• Original file(s)/folder(s) sent to ZIP archive
• ZIP archive sent to RAR archive

Sound cool? Okay. I will post the results after testing a bit.

Test 1

Original foldersize: 24.0 mB
Size after step 1(ZIP): 10.7 mB; 44% of original
Size after step 2(RAR): 9.16 mB; 85% of step 1
So, final .duo file: 9.16 mB
Percent of original: about 38%
Hey, that looks pretty good to me.. a little less than 40% its original size.. I could live with that

Test 2

Original foldersize: 76.2 mB
Size after step 1: 28.2 mB; 37% of original
Size after step 2: 28.1 mB; 99.6% of step 2
Final .duo file: ~37% of original
This one makes step 2 seem pretty petty. But hey, that’s just one test.. more coming soon.

Test 3

Original foldersize: 253 mB
Size after step 1: 250 mB; 98.8% of original
Size after step 2: 249 mB
Final .duo file: 98.4% of original

So, I have concluded that a Double-Compression method would be pretty useful. I will test this again on a different file/folder later. So double-compressed files will be .duo files. Rename it to *.rar (* being whatever the filename originally was) then decompress that, then decompress the ZIP archive inside it. I recommend WinRAR as your client for this, as it supports both.

I will almost definitely be releasing a client for this, just hold your horses..