/whois Ozh
TL;DR: along the years,
- Father of two, huge wine enthusiast, metal head
- High profile Quake player
- WordPress expert
- Published author
- Maker of YOURLS
You'll find me here, on Github, on Fosstodon, on Spotify
#define QUAKE
Back in 1997, I started to play Quake online, and on the 1st June 1998 I founded the uberl33t clan French Frag Factory. Our feared clantag was [SARL], if you are or have been anything near a serious Quake player in Europe, chances are you know us. Don't lie.
Over the years, the clan site rapidly became the #1 community site for French speaking Quake players in the world. At that time, the most important website and daily visit was planetquake.com… Hence the name of my site :)
WordPress
As my website evolved (see below) I became more and more interested, and involved, in WordPress and its ecosystem. Between 2005 and 2015 I released a ton of plugins, tutorials and code. I contributed to the core and spoke at a WordCamp and other venues. Eventually, I co-authored the definitive book (at that time at least :) about WordPress plugin development.
Glorious years :)
YOURLS
My most successful project is YOURLS, a self hosted URL shortener written in PHP.
Used by hundreds of thousands users, including Fortune 500 companies, the NASA, government organisations, internet celebrities, countless universities. It features hundreds of plugins, ranks among the top 60 PHP project on Github, where it has more than 12K stars.
get_planetozh_version($year);
My first online presence, aka planetozh-alpha-0.1, was an ugly page, crippled with enough animated GIF's to overload my 28.8k modem, hosted on Compuserve. It was 1995 at the time !
Version 1 of planetOzh started in 1996, and was a regular static html site, which you still can visit here. Hey, it was pretty good, actually :) I was interested in HTML and in learning Javascript, and wrote some rather nice scripts, it was great Web 1.0!
Version 2 didn't really existed but was splitted over various places : code pieces were on a static page, then for a while I used a script called Thought Bucket, and my rants and articles were written on my French Quake community site, which was also my Perl training grounds.
Version 3 was born in May 2004, hosted off my gaming website. I started to use WordPress and decided to learn some PHP. Kind of live on archive.org: planetOzh v3
In late April 2007 entered Version 4. These were my peak blogging years, mostly WordPress centric. Kind of live on archive.org: planetOzh v4
Welcome to planetOzh Version 5 : after a long hiatus (ten. years. omg.) I decided in may 2026 to blog again. New WP theme, still using the stamp imagery because I really like this idea of sending a virtual postcard to my future self :) Much less WordPress, much more YOURLS, still code for sure.
I hardly ever get to be first! I've just written a post about your new plugin page plugin – it's on my sandbox blog (you've got the link)
Great stuff you've got on a great site. Also – you write like a well-educated native English speaker – i.e. better than most of us Yanks. Thanks for letting me be first.
Jon
Hi Ozh,
I found your site through by following a network of links from WordPress related sites. I was very pleased to have found it, and your "changing the admin css" tutorial was very helpful.
More importantly, I read the post above and noticed we were both born in the same year, and even more important than that, was the fact that you mentioned the Suicidal Tendencies…
I am subscribed and look forward to your posts. Take care…
Hi Oz,
You seem to be the expert on WordPress Plugins for the development community. Teli Adlam referred me to your site.
Maybe I missed it, but I don't see your actual name anywhere? Are you flying in stealth mode?
I'll be trying out your "Who Sees Ads" Google AdSense plugin and recommending it to everyone, so I'm hoping you'll keep it updated.
I'm also mentioning it in the comments to this (rather popular) post: 10 Best WordPress Plugins for AdSense
Hi Ozh,
For someone like me who isn't at all technically inclined, I still find myself liking your site and reading through your posts on WP themes etc. I can sense the passion you have for WP stuff and am thankful for your contribution to the rest of the community.
Will be coming back here often to learn more.
Thanks again.
Sylvester
[…] plugina Ozh ja integriral COLOURlovers v izbiro osnovnih barv strani. Tako lahko na zelo coolski na?in […]
haha…your old site is cool….especially for 1996 HTML!!!!! The menu is cool too – WIFE.EXE … lol . . . classic . . . didn't know you play quake live . . . I do too . . . I love your wp-admin plug-in . . . its the best . . . Thanks again!!!!
I found ur site really interesting and ur introduction is really impressive. If could jump with the drupal community it would be great. I am a drupal player but ur sites was interesting to surf through.. God bless you for ur gud act.
And now.. this blog is famous! :D No updates after 2007 in this about me page? O_O Just curious about you that's why I read your about page. Hehe.
Updated or not. I think he was in front.. so his design from 2007 still is suitable for 2012.. Times are changing, but quality doesn't..
Grtz from NL