Issues with embedding Vimeo videos with HTTPS URLs

As documented in WordPress trac ticket #20102, there is an issue with oEmbeds from some services which have started allowing/using https URLs rather than http URLs. The ticket documents an issue with the oEmbed functionality, oEmbed is the technology which allows you to paste a YouTube URL into your blog and have that converted to …

Speeding myself up on the commandline

I tend to find myself in the terminal.app on my Mac more often than not, SSHing into servers, checking whois, host, and any number of other things. My most frequent incantation is searching the command history so I don’t have to re-type a previous command, something like this: I’ll then copy and paste the command …

A quick custom plugin to import redirections into Safe Redirect Manager

At Code for the People we’ve just imported a load of blogposts from Drupal into WordPress. One of the differences is that Drupal encodes fancy characters, like typographically nice “quote marks”, into the URL whereas WordPress mostly drops them. We ended up with about 80 URLs which had changed and the need for a redirections …

Alfred extension: Convert clipboard to plain text

Update: Well, what do you I know? It turns out that Andrew, developer of Alfred, has already got this covered and my weak Google-Fu didn’t turn it up: plain text paste in Alfred. So don’t use my version, use his. I got tired of copying formatted text from a web page, pasting into a text …

Clickable stack traces with Netbeans

I’m clearly in a fickle mood this month, as I’ve changed my PHP editor again, this time to Netbeans (thanks to the tireless nagging of @JJJ)… so far, so good. I particularly love being able to jump to declarations quickly and easily. One hurdle I overcame today, and I’d be interested to know if there’s …

Filtering HTML to exclude all but a small number of HTML elements and attributes

How much do we trust user input? Not. At. All. That’s how much we trust user input. You just don’t know where they’ve been! WordPress has such a plethora of functions for escaping and filtering input and output, that I’m always discovering new possibilities. One I found recently is wp_kses, which allows you to strip …