WebCoder

Geeky License Plates

Geeky License Plates

I am getting one of those when I get a car!

Improve Your Wordpress with Plugins

WordPress (WP) is great as is, but did you know that you could improve it? Plugins add more to the functionality to your blog. The official plugin directory has a lot, but I will focus on my favorites.

All In One SEO Pack

Blogs are useless unless they have some readers. If you write articles, you should try to optimize them for search engines. This extension has many options, such as changing the home page title and description and changing the format of the titles of various pages.

Google Syntax Highlighter

If you run a coding blog, you need a plugin like this. This one uses JavaScript to highlight code in many different languages. You can see it in use on this site.

NextGEN Gallery

This is a plugin for you artists/photographers. It displays a gallery of images on a page you specify, and contains many admin features such as uploading from a zip file, albums, and roles, so people other than the main admin can modify the gallery.

ShareThis

Social media sites are among the best ways to get a lot of traffic (assuming your server can handle it!). This plugin adds a button to the bottom of each post. Click it, and the users can submit the post to sites like Digg or StumbleUpon, email it, or post it on their own blogs.

WP-SpamFree

Spam is very annoying for blog owners. It adds lots of junk to the moderation queue, and spams your inbox if you have notifications enabled. This extension uses multiple tests to verify that the commenter is human, and does not require an account on another website.

And now you know 5 more methods of making your blog better. Happy blogging!

16 Ways to Waste Time on the Internet

After a long day of web programming, why not relax for a while? These sites will help with that.

Free Games

• Sodaplay - Contains some different physics games. You can build moving creations out of springs and masses, make a minigame, or draw shapes in different colors and animate them.
• Phun - You can build 2D things out of parts like boxes, circles, hinges, fixates and springs. When you’re done you can upload it to Phun Box to share it with other people a nd get ratings and comments.
• iSketch - A game like Pictionary, but played online with people from all over the world. One person draws an object, and other people try to guess what it is. The winner is the person with the most points, which are obtained by drawing good pictures or guessin correctly.
• Free Evo2 4×4 Evo 2 is a game that originally came out in 2001, but has recently been released as a free download. It has lots of offroad tracks, a career mode, and multiplayer online play. The only catch is that most of the trucks have been removed from the game and replaced with a few custom ones.
• Falling Sand Game - A collection of online as well as downloadable games. This is sort of difficult to explain, but it’s more interesting than it sounds, especially if you download one of the games and install modifications (in the wxSand, Enigma Sand, and Burning Sand forums.)

Websites

• StumbleUpon - This is a toolbar integrated with a website. After you sign up, you can tell the site what your interests are. Then you can click the Stumble! button to visit sites related to your interests. After you arrive at a site you can click the I like it or Not for me buttons to affect what sites it shows you in the future. You can also review websites, or add people that you are interested in as a fan to see the sites that they have rated.
• PyWeek- A contest for games made with the Python language. You can enter your games in the contests, or download games other people have made (there are a lot).
• Computer Stupidities - Stories about stupid people trying to use computers!

Blogs

• TechCrunch - General tech blog.
• Gizmodo - News about new tech products.
• Oddity Central - Funny pictures!

Resources

• HotScripts - Largest collection of scripts in all languages.
• Dafont.com - Lots of free fonts, in many different categories.
• Good-Tutorials - Tutorials for just about anything.
• Zymic - Free hosting, tutorials, and templates.
• YoungCoders - Help forum for young programmers.

A Myth

We had to write Native American myths in my literature class. Here is mine (I got a 98% on it).

More »

Super-Simple Wordpress RSS Syndication For Your Site

If you’re like me you probably have a blog as well as another site. I have found that an effective way to get vistiors to the blog is to link to it from the main site, assuming that that site is more popular. RSS (Really Simple Syndicate) is a way of syndicating your blog to other areas of the web. It is based on XML and generated automatically by Wordpress.

A PHP RSS parser is MagpieRSS. We will be using it in the following tutorial.

1. Download the most recent version of MagpieRSS from the above website.
2. Upload the “rss” folder to your web server.
3. Next we need to make a PHP include file for displaying the posts. Use the following code

   <?php
   require_once('rss/rss_fetch.inc'); //Include the MagpieRSS include file
   $url = 'http://yoursite.com/blog/?feed=rss2'; //Set a variable containing the URL to your blogs RSS feed
   $rss = fetch_rss($url); //Retrieve the posts
   $items = array_slice($rss->items, 0, 5); //Only show the first 5 posts (the second number can be customized to suit your needs)
   $posts = '';
   foreach ($items as $item) { //Loop through the items
   	$href = $item['link'];
   	$cat = $item['category'];
   	$title = $item['title'];
   	$date = $item['pubdate'];
   	$text = $item['content']['encoded'];
   	$text = preg_replace('/<img [^>]+\/?>/', '[image]', $text); //Replace images with [image]
   	$text = preg_replace('/<\/?[^>]+>/', '', $text); //Get rid of HTML
   	$posts .= "<li><a href=$href>$title</a> <em>".substr($text, 0, 100)."</em></li>"; //Print the current post title linked to the page on your blog, and the first 100 chars of the post
   }
   echo $posts;
   ?>

4. Now you can include that file into your site wherever you want the feed to appear. Enjoy the free traffic!

Google Reader

A few weeks ago I discovered Google Reader. If you read a lot of blogs, Google Reader is for you. Put in the URL to the RSS feeds of the blogs you read, or you can also select pre-selected packages of blogs. Then, the site will aggregate all the posts together onto one page. It’s web-based so you can access it from any computer.

The 16 worst things in the universe

A very random list, not in any order (except the first one). Don’t take offense if you like one of the things on this list (or if you ARE on this list).

• Windows Vista
• People that sign up for my site and never post anything
• Spambots on my blog (my blog sends me an email when someone posts a comment, so it’s annoying) (when I get un-lazy I’ll install a spam filter)
• People who I used to work with that start a new site, without telling me anything about it (you know who you are)
• Heavy textbooks
• Internet that doesn’t work half the time after your ISP is bought by a big company who moves the data center from Georgia to Ohio/New York/Chicago
• AP US History
• Internet Explorer (!!!)
• People who take my code for a game, then make a new game based on my code which gets more popular than mine, without giving me any credit
• Cybersquatters
• Having to clean up after my dog after he gets in the trash can
• Having to clean up after my dog when he throws up on the floor
• Being kept awake past midnight by my dog when he scratches at the door due to a thunderstorm
• Having a dog (jk!)
• Boring classes (last year 1/2 of my classes would literally have no work on some days, it’s better this year…)
• People who read an interesting blog post on my site and don’t leave a comment (hint hint hint)

Free Advertising (again)

My last post about this didn’t get much response (probably because of the stupid title and writing)… but if you want a link in my blogroll, leave a comment on this post. It’s looking sort of empty.

How To Catch Hackers, Pt. 2a

As a minor update, this is what my inbox looks like since adding the SQL/XSS detector code:

Update: This was supposed to be part 2a…

1Scripts 3: The Inside Scoop

I know that this version of the site has been out a while, but I feel like posting about it.

The Idea

In early spring 2008 I was going to make a site where people could submit tutorials. Sounds pretty basic, but this one was different. The tutorials on the front page were chosen by the users, like a Digg for tutorials. I finished the viewing part, so you could view tutorials and comments, and sort by tags and categories. The sorting code was not done yet.

Months went by, and I was never motivated to finish it. In late July I found a partially finished design for 1Scripts I had made a while ago. I finished the design, and integrated it with TinyCMS (the last version of 1Scripts ran on this script, as did the tutorial script). While changing the script to work with the new design I noticed a bug in the CMS. A really bad bug. I tried to fix it, and downloaded the newest version from my site to make sure I didn’t have an old buggy version. Didn’t work. I realized that the bug had been created in an update, since 1Scripts, which ran a modified old version of the CMS, did not have the bug. I ported all the code of the script to run without the CMS, and finished coding the rest of the script. And on July 23, 2008 A.D., I uploaded the script to my website. It worked!

Now there were just a few minor things to finish up. I added all the codes and tutorials, fixing some bugs while the site was on the server. Then there was the issue of the site news (blog). The old blog was a TinyCMS module. Since the new site did not run TinyCMS, I had to make a lot of changes to get it to work. I downloaded the old blog data file to my computer and uploaded it to the new site. I got hit with the “serialized data files don’t transfer well from Linux to Windows bug,” which had affected 1Scripts when it was only 2 months old. I thought it only happened if you edited the file on another OS, but apparently just downloading it was enough. I was forced to replace it with a blank data file.

Technical Details

Time Spent: 2-3 days finishing the code, converting it, and modifying the design, more time making the design and beginning the code (months earlier)

Programming Language: PHP (…)

Data storage method: serialized arrays for the data, phpBB for the login system (nitsua’s idea)

Visitors: 50-150 per day, 25-50 for this blog

Page Rank: 2 for the main site, view more