Automatic WordPress Plugin Updates

December 17, 2025 | Comment

I wrote a plugin for our local U3A group, but I didn’t want to add it to the official WordPress.org repository as it had no relevance to the general WordPress user base. However, I still wanted to make it as easy as possible for people to install and update but WordPress won’t know how to check for updates on its own. That’s where Plugin Update Checker comes in.

Plugin Update Checker is a lightweight PHP library that adds WordPress-style update notifications to custom or private plugins. Once configured, your plugin behaves just like an official WordPress.org hosted plugin: WordPress checks … Read the rest

Grabbing YouTube’s Thumbnail Image

November 28, 2025 | Comment

Sometimes there are simple solutions to life’s little problems. I had a need to get the thumbnail image associated with a YouTube video. I spent ages mucking around in the browser code inspector trying to work out how I could achieve this without much success.

Turns out that there is a simple, repeatable way using YouTube’s built-in thumbnail URLs

Get the Video ID

Every YouTube video has a predictable thumbnail URL, for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ. Go on, click it, you know you want to!

So generically this is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID

And in our example above the ID is dQw4w9WgXcQ.

Get Images

… Read the rest

Family History Database Searches

May 1, 2025 | Comment

Amongst all my many hobbies is researching my family history, which I have been doing on and off (well, more off actually) for the last 30 years. Over that time, how you research has changed enormously with so many records now being available online. Also, when I first started, the only way to record your information was on paper, but now there are numerous software packages that have largely replaced the need for paper.

Data Mining

The main issue with recording your family history information in a software package is that you are beholden to the developer’s choice of what … Read the rest

Evernote Rules

April 1, 2025 | 1 comment

I have been an avid user of Evernote since July 2008 and have amassed over 53,000 notes. Over those 16 years, I have seen many changes to both Evernote the company and the client itself. The recent purchase by Bending Spoons had the potential to make or break the company but has, in my opinion, been overwhelmingly positive for Evernote (despite what the naysayers on Reddit say!).

Introducing Evernote Rules

One feature I have wanted Evernote to have is some form of automation that manipulates notes based on rules – very similar to the rules available in Outlook. After … Read the rest

What Should I Watch Next?

March 1, 2025 | 1 comment

Back last December I wrote about a project that I had written called What Should I Play Next? where it would randomly choose something from my record collection to play. This month’s project, part of my 👨‍💻12 Apps in 12 Months challenge, is the visual equivalent.

The Plex API

When I want to watch a film I am sometimes constrained by the amount of time I have and usually have some feeling of the genre I want so I wanted something that catered for that plus could also exclude things that I had watched before.

While I do subscribe to … Read the rest

RWOL from Alexa

RWOL from Alexa

February 10, 2025 | Comment

At the end of 2023, I wrote about how I had used a Raspberry Pi Zero to act as a machine to remotely turn on and off a media server that I had in my house. The idea being that it was unnecessary to have it on 24/7, consuming electricity when I was asleep for much of that time.

While I had a nice little web app from which I could trigger the start up and shut down I always wanted to be able to do it using voice commands via Alexa. Today I finally got round to doing that … Read the rest

Simple WordPress Post Stats

February 1, 2025 | 2 comments

Every year, over on my personal blog, I write a round-up post covering what I have done during the year. This includes books read, films watched steps taken etc. What it has never covered are my creative endeavours which would be my developments over at Github and my blog posts.

Where are the WordPress Stats?

I sort of assumed that there would be stacks of stats in the WordPress dashboard but no if you want that you have to install Jetpack and get the nagging messages asking you to upgrade. These stats are very similar to what you … Read the rest

👨‍💻12 Apps in 12 Months

January 28, 2025 | Comment

It seems to be en vouge at the moment to challenge yourself to develop an application a month and do so in public. These apps tend to be AI driven, very slick, with their own landing pages etc. I wanted to stretch myself this year and increase the cadence of my development and so a 12 Apps in 12 Months challenge sounded like a good idea.

But not like that!

While a challenge seemed like a good idea, I didn’t want to be producing apps just for the sake of it. I felt that for it to be worthwhile, I … Read the rest

Discogs Wrapped

January 8, 2025 | Comment

If you’re not a Spotify user, as I’m not, then all the self-congratulatory Spotify Wrapped posts at the end of each year can become quite wearing. It’s not that I don’t listen to music; it’s just that I don’t consume it through streaming. I’m an old-fashioned, physical music kind of guy, and I have lots of vinyl records.

What I thought if I could have my own version of Spotify Wrapped? Enter…

Discogs Wrapped

My music media collection is all catalogued in the online service Discogs which also has an api. In fact, it was this that I used this … Read the rest

What Should I Play next?

December 16, 2024 | 3 comments

I’ve got a lot of records (At the time of writing 1,076 Discogs tells me) and I always seem to gravitate to the same ones. I decided I needed help to selecting something to play so I wrote Now Playing to help guide me.

The Discogs API

Like many, I record details of my collection on the online service Discogs, which contains a user-generated database of audio releases in whatever format they are or were available. It also has an API that allows you to access certain information that is held within its database. If you are authenticated that … Read the rest