I'm a reader of the wp-hackers mailing list. Besides some fairly useless and unproductive advocacy or opinion threads happening on an annoyingly regular basis, the list is also a very great place to share code tips and snippets. Someone asks a "how do I do this" question, and someone else (sometimes) comes up with a smarter, simpler or shorter solution than you'd thought of. Every time it happens, I say to myself "you really should write this down, it could be useful in the future".

So, I'll start now collecting those pieces of PHP code that I find particularly noteworthy, in this blog naturally, under the tag "WordPress Snippet".

The increasingly popular Prologue theme now has a dedicated website: Prologue Theme, with a convenient download link pointing to a .zip archive instead of an SVN repository. What I like about this theme is the idea they had to include a trimmed down version of the post interface right into the home page. I see a number of themes doing the same in the future.

This is a truly scary story : David Airey got his domain stolen because of a GMail vulnerability.

Short story: it was (seems it's fixed) possible to create filters on Gmail just by visiting a link or, say, loading a hidden frame on a malicious website. Like, create a filter to forward to evilguy@evilhost.com any email containing the word "password" and you're pretty much stealing everything from everyone. Long story: David's experience, or just the technical proof of concept and explanations.

Number one item on your to do list: check your Gmail filters right now and see if there is any suspicious forward you can't remember setting up.

Gmail implemented a very cool feature (or at least it was recently added to my account) in the form of colored labels. You can assign each label a color from a selection, and I find this really handy when you're scanning through all your unread mails at once. I like it.

Too bad I'm still receiving various mails that were sent sometimes more than 5 days ago. I'd rather have instant mail delivery instead of shiny new features…

One of the lesser advertised and known feature of Facebook is that you can link to a prettier profile URL than the default and rather lame profile.php?id=123456789. For instance, my profile URL is either: Ozh (full profile, sucky URL) or Ozh (short profile public page, slightly less sucky URL).

From an SEO perspective it does not change a lot since complete profile pages on Facebook are unspiderable by search engines because they are behind a login, but from a usability and readability point of view, I think it's better, since you get a hint of the actual destination of the link when hovering it.

To craft your own "prettier profile URL", go to your profile, and scroll all the way down to the very bottom. Click on "Create a Profile Badge" and here it is. Not as cool as Last.FM's plain /user/username/, but better anyway.

Although not explicitly mentioned, it works the same for pages that you can create for a site, product or anything (example: my blog's page), and you can even make it shorter replacing "people" with just "p" (example)

Edit: AH. Those retarded dumbasses replied to my feature suggestion with an account disabling, because it seems that using "Ozh Ozh" as a name is a violation of their TOS. Very great support there :) It's back. What a bunch of donkeys. Who cares if you're using your name, a nickname or your dog's name, really :)