Giant Robot

This plugin generates a Photofeed (aka PhotoCast, or an RSS-based image stream), from your WordPress posts. If you have a category which contains images or pictures, you can use this plugin to turn that category on your blog into a screensaver or other eye-candy.

We had a need for a Drupal module which would add a customisable user registration question - this is to allow the owner of a book to register for additional features on the associated website.

In order to make this as widely useful as possible, we've implemented it as a CAPTCHA plugin, so that any Drupal form can take advantage of the functionality. You'll need to have the

This is an early release of the code - it's working for us, but we welcome any feedback from the community.

I've started using Slife to track my time on various projects. It's a pretty cool OSX time tracker and visualisation tool - a picture is worth a thousand words, they say:

Slife in month view - each dot represents a moment of activity in your day; hover for basic details, click to visit the relevant email, webpage, file etc.

With a WPCMS site, some pages are "special" pages - order return pages and error pages for example - which you might not want included in a sitemap. Likewise, some sites have a page which has a lot of additional content based on the variables supplied (an example of this is the Dog and Lemon Guide's Japanese Vehicle Recall database, which lists recalls affecting 46,000,000 vehicles from 21 car companies).

I've been using libapache2-mod-auth-mysql for a CiviCRM site which requires authentication from a Drupal DB, and
it worked well generally but gave intermittent MySQL disconnections. These were making the authentication fail with an error 500, which was ... ugly ...

It took lots of digging, but eventually I found a simple patch that seems to fix the problem. It simply tells MySQL to reconnect when the link fails, which was (before MySQL 5.0) the default but isn't any more.

For a few sites, I've used WordPress as a CMS, and if you're using lots of pages and few posts, the default menu arrangement is a little leftwards. So here's a simple plugin that makes WordPress default to creating Pages (not Posts) when clicking the "Write" menu, and list Pages (not Posts) when clicking the "Manage" menu.

That's all it does. Download it and use it: xb Pages Are Default

Frog Blog uses Favatars, a favicon.ico / avatar plugin. Recently (after a server upgrade) we had to rebuild the favatar index on 25,000 comments, and this ... was going to take a while. About seven hours. Ugh.

After a look at the favatars code, it was pretty obvious what needed to be done. So here, thanks to the environmentally conscious open source movement, is a much faster favatars.php. (More like five minutes. Aaah.)

This plugin, xb Tag-Out Regex Wrestling Teammate, allows you to cast a steely samurai gaze over a given post and extract in an instant the tag you seek.

Say, for example (this is what I made it for), you have a post with an image in it. You want to yank the image (tag) only, and display that in a query somewhere else. You need this plugin and a line of code like this inside the loop that will show your extracted image:

<?php echo xb_extractor("<img[^>]*>"); ?>

I've been very impressed by Google Analytics, but I noticed an error appearing in FireFox browsers. While apparently harmless, it makes it hard to debug your JavaScript if something else is shouting for attention :)

So, I replaced the reference to Google's urchin.js with a fixed version (thanks to Caleb who provided the modified routine). You are welcome to copy this to your own site and use it there.

This is a very silly Voice Synthesis Plugin for WordPress. It makes the webserver speak the viewed page title out loud. It's about six lines long and deserves to be. I hope it makes you laugh like it did me.

It uses OSX 10.3 (or later) 'say' command out of the box. If you aren't using OSX, simply alias 'say' to your favourite commandline voice synth (festival etc). Haha, if you've played with festival you already know just how easy that is.