A few days ago, the fine folks from DigWP have published a .htaccess trick to enable logging in from yoursite.com/login instead of yoursite.com/wp-login.php.

Their trick is perfectly valid, yet improvable: it requires editing of the .htaccess, a file you don't want noobs to mess with. So my thoughts were: "OK, that's nice and everything, but a simple plugin would be cleaner, easier for beginners, and more portable". Let's do this?
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Every year, Christmas is a truly awesome event at my parents' with my sisters, wife and brothers-in-law. We offer each other a shitload of gifts while eating fine food cooked by Mom and drinking top notch wine prepared by Dad. In those dozens of gifts, of course a lot are mostly jokes or inexpensive stuff, and every year I make several DIY stuff that are funny and anticipated for.

Two years ago one of my presents was, for each couple, a little pack of "Love Coupons". I liked the cute sissiness of the idea but wanted to make it more funny and less sissy, so I scouted the web for Barbie and Ken pictures to make several cool coupons, such as these ones (in Fwench). Good for… a romantic night, a massage, kinky stuff, shopping with you, etc…, each time trying to more or less match the Barbie pic.

It was funny and girls loved it :) When I showed them to friends, several asked for the file so they could print the same, so here it is, in its full .PSD glory complete with 13 layers of different Barbie pics (and English messages).

Click to download the .psd (5.3 MB)

If you happen to use the PSD template and make some cool Love Coupons, be sure to share some pics :)

Wife and kids decorating our Christmas tree:

This is my first time lapse video. After having taken 150 pictures I decided it would be a good idea to read a few tutorials on how to make time lapse videos, and, well, it would have been slightly better the other way around :) The exposure is a bit short and the lightning should have been tweaked before shooting. I'm learning, and I definitely want to do more of this. I've just snatched an intervalometer on Ebay because, yes, I was sitting near the camera for all that time :)

Earlier today, Dougal tweeted about DRUPLEH, a satirical news site about Drupal. If you haven't caught his tweet, my retweet or any other mention about this, go check it now. It's brilliant, it's fun, it's awesome, it's entertaining. We *need* to have such a thing for WordPress.

We so need, that we must haz: Project WordPreh is ready to get off the ground and now need some voluntrollsteers to really start and make something funny with this!

As I envision it (but it's not like I'm proclaiming myself the leader of the project) , the site would be trolling on fun stuff, would be mocking devs about their goofs, would be bashing other platforms about their misfortunes or successes. It would be run by several peeps with a good knowledge of what's going on and enough sense of humor to be derisive of themselves when deserved. It would be making fun of others but keep on the funny side of thing and avoid being just mean (which does require quite some editorial skills, says Ozh who has been Mighty Chief Redactor of his uni's satirical paper for quite some time). Maybe it might try to spread totally obvious false rumors, too :Þ

It could be like this, just better and funnier and with *real* news too :) (click for bigger)

The DRUPLEH site, which I really like, is a simple Tumblr-like blog with links only. That's a good start, maybe WordPreh could also feature some WTF-code-snippets as I'm sure there are tons out there. Yes, the upcoming post format feature is exactly what we need here.

So far, to take the plunge and evolve from a fun idea to a real website, the project needs:

• a logo (should be OK)
• a theme (might be in the works already)
• a team

What do you think about this whole thing? Sounds fun? Should be different? Do you think you could contribute to this? :)

Edit: WordPreh. Eheh.

Sometimes users of stuff I code are nice enough to send me a donation that fits into a Paypal email notification. And sometimes users are just crazy cool and their donation require the postman in person :)
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This is a short PSA to warn potential buyers: don't buy The Internet is a Playground from David Thorne aka @27bslash6. It's a scam.
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Obligatory geekness and proselytism: "Ask me about WordPress"

I just got it in the mail today so I instantly dropped all current affairs to take the picture :) Love this t-shirt? Get yours now on WordPress Shirts where you can vote for the next design they'll print (my favorite one is Powered by WP by the way). I also dig their fan section when you can submit your mugshot :)

Wear WordPress!

From my experience, here is how time is spent when writing a book about WordPress plugins:

Seriously, the brainstorm part is ridiculously important.

Writing standalone snippets only is neat sometimes, but on the long run it might leave the reader with the impression they won't be able to glue the various parts into a functional plugin themselves. The perfect plugin that will illustrate a given topic has to be:

• very short: nobody wants to read 50 lines of add_options_page() and HTML if you just want to show how to add a nonce and verify it
• open and inspirational: the plugin should give the user ideas on where to reuse this code, how to improve a plugin they made in the past. Giving an example of a very focused plugin such as guiding a missile may be neat, but it'll be useful to the reader only if they want to code the same plugin.
• useful: it's always tempting to illustrate a concept with short and near-to-useless code because you're more focused on the concept than on the illustration.

So far, in each of the chapters I wrote for the book, there will be 4 or 5 plugins that, I hope, will meet all these criteria (short, useful, easy to build on), and Brad and Justin are also making a fantastic job with very neat plugin ideas.

And, yeah, I like to draw pie charts :)

Disclaimer: This one is more awesome than a Nintendo Sixty-FOOOOOOOOOOUR for Christmas. You will want to buy it. You will buy it.

The tshirt itself is pretty regular: black, a not too fancy "Let Your Dark Side Out" slogan across the chest. Nothing to scream for.

But then you sort of flip the shirt up onto your face and reveal its unique awesomeness in a BWAAAARRRH! BRAINS! moment.

I believe this tshirt was originally promo material for an episode of the Resident Evil video game series, but you can actually buy it from CapCom.

Reactions to this tshirt are usually mixed. Kids love it (either kids, or those who feel like they are a teenager trapped into a 35+ years old body), while random colleagues just mutter about how you're the new weirdo around.

It will be a matter of personal preference or a matter of clients asking for it, but I bet this one is going to be a frequent question in the next months: "How do I remove the Admin Bar?".

Ahah. I'm so funny.

This will probably slightly change as this component is heavily under works, but as of now this short plugin will do:

Either make this a regular plugin in wp-content/plugins/ and activate it, or just drop it in wp-content/mu-plugins/.

Update: now a downloadable plugin.

Update 2: this was a sort of a proof of concept. Now that WordPress 3.1 is released and has a per-user option to disable it, this plugin is incomplete: if you want to disable the admin bar, also hide the option as Pete Mall explains.