Recently I’ve started to read one interesting book: “Spidering hacks” by Kevin Hemenway and Tara Calishain. I think this book is a MUST READ for every spider developer.

All examples in this book are written in Perl. But I’ve just started to learn Perl and I look for the description of one or another Perl function in manual very often. It’s very comfortable to use search engine plugins in Firefox for these purposes.

But I was wondered very much when I did not find any firefox search engine plugin for Perl manual. So I decided to make my own one. I’ve quickly found good article which helped me to do it.

Install Perl manual search engine plugin (Firefox2+, IE7)

Install PHP manual search engine plugin (Firefox2+, IE7)

Install CPAN search engine plugin (Firefox2+, IE7)

The books I recommend:

Yesterday I found a great article about adding a drop shadow to images by Brian Williams and decided to implement this method on my blog. After that I though if my readers want to have the stylish drop shadows on their blogs too and decided to develop a wordpress plugin which will automatically add a drop shadow to each posted image.

Wanna to have the image drop shadows on your blog like on my one? ;-)

Just download the plugin, install it, activate it and enjoy!

Download Image Drop Shadow wordpress plugin now (zip, 4.4 kb)

If you use wordpress plugin like runPHP and All in One SEO Pack plugin, you can have a problem. This thing can take place if you insert php tags at the beginning of the post. In this case All in One SEO Pack will truncate the text of the autogenerated meta description tag.

For example, if the beginning of your post is

My <a href="<?php echo get_permalink(15); ?>">previous post</a> was about wordpress.

the autogenerated meta description will not be “My previous post was about wordpress” as you expect, but it will be “My”. This is because of strip_tags php function does not support php tags inside html tags.

To fix this issue just insert the row:

$text = preg_replace('/<\?php.+?\?>/i', '', $text);

in the beginning of the functions trim_excerpt_without_filters and trim_excerpt_without_filters_full_length.

Do you remember I was going to develop my iGoogle gadget? Yeah, I did it! :)

The idea of a gadget was taken from the famous “50 films to see before you die” list by Film4. This is a list of the 50 best movies which Film4 recommend everybody to see. My gadget shows the information about each film from this list like film’s title, year, plot, thumbnail, links to the film’s trailer, IMDB page and Amazon page and has handy navigation bar which allows to move from one film from the list to another, mark the film as seen, move through unseen movies.

Here is the preview:

To add this gadget to your iGoogle page just click on this button:

P.S.: BTW, I’ve already seen 12 films and keep seeing the others. The list is really great!

One of my readers asked me to add to PageRank Spider tool an ability to resume the checking process after it has been incorrectly completed. This can take place if Google banned your IP or you closed the browser window prematurely or some error happened.

In new version you will see new button on the bottom of result page if the results are incomplete or have the errors.

Just click on this button and PageRank Spider will complete the current task. You will not see this button if the current results are complete and errorless.

Installation and upgrade instructions are described in INSTALL file.

New version also includes updated CodeIgniter (1.6.3) and jQuery (1.2.6) source files.

Download PageRank Spider 1.1