Yet Another Web Development Blog

WP-SlashSig v0.1 Released

December 4th, 2006

In my most recent post, I mentioned how it’s important to build interesting web projects just for the heck of it. Well, today I got the itch to try and build a WordPress plugin. The result is WP-SlashSig.

WP-SlashSig is a WordPress plugin that allows you to automatically set your Slashdot comment signature to match your latest blog post title. Considering the size of the audience, it’s a great way to promote your blog. It works by using the CURL library within PHP to essentially screen scrape (e.g., impersonate a web browser) your user profile page at Slashdot. Any application that relies on screen scraping is unavoidably brittle. The Slashdot guys could change the site tomorrow and WP-SlashSig may stop working until I can release an updated version. However, for a screen scraper it’s pretty robust. It should resist almost all layout changes; about the only way to break it is to change how the Slashdot profile page functions or to rename the textarea containing the signature.

The other caveat is that a Slashdot signature is restricted to only 120 characters. Since this limit includes the markup, it’s very easy to create a blog title that’s too long. However, when publishing the post, you can manually input an abbreviated title for use on Slashdot.

Please keep in mind that this is the first release of my first Wordpress Plugin, but I’d greatly welcome any feedback. I haven’t yet had the opportunity to test it in any enviroments other than my own blog. So, it’s definately “beta” in the true sense of the word.

Installation Instructions

Download the file archive (below).
Uncompress the file in the root of your WordPress installation. Make sure that it creates the path ‘wp-content/plugins/wp-slashsig/’ when the files are extracted. If not, you’ll have to manually create the directory and move the files there.
Active the plugin by going into the WordPress admin panel and selected in the “Plugins” tab
Go to the “Options” tab and then the “WP-SlashSig” sub-tab and configure WP-SlashSig with your Slashdot username and password.
Done! You should notice the new input box on your “Write Post” page.