I’ve been doing a lot of work lately with raw WordPress options (what’s stored in the database), and started getting annoyed at manually unserializing the ones that are serialized to see what’s in them. I was also working with a lot of content that was JSON encoded, so it was all getting a bit tedious. Enter the Secret Decoder Ring!
This is a super-simple (basic, dodgy, hackish), fun little script that allows you to quickly decode “encoded” information in a variety of formats. I have it in my browser toolbar as a bookmark so that I can get at it easily. All you do is copy-paste something into it, and then click the appropriate button to get decoded output. Click the link below and give it a shot.
Secret Decoder Ring
It’s also handy if your WordPress install gets hacked (hi Dreamhost! 
) and someone adds a bunch of base64_encoded() junk in your files, because now you can quickly and easily decode it and see what it says.
It’s almost time for another WordCamp event, and I can’t wait. This is the big one – the fourth annual San Francisco WordCamp! This will also be the fourth WordCamp that I’ve attended. Yes, I believe that makes me somewhat of a groupie.
There’s a new website online as of yesterday and it’s looking pretty spiffy. I’m looking forward to seeing Tim Ferriss and Tara Hunt speak in particular.
Oh, and I’m going to be helping out on the “Genius Bar” for a bit as well, so drop by and get some questions answered!
This will probably be a bit of a different experience for me than previous years because I’ve been doing some consulting work with Automattic, so I’ve met a lot of the crew now, and it’ll be good to see a lot of them again here.
So Digg have released their wonderful new DiggBar product, to a lot of fanfare, excitement and, well… criticism. I’ll let other people cover each angle. In the meantime, if you want to prevent your site from being loaded with the DiggBar, just drop this code into the top of your page (or in an external JavaScript file if you already have one that loads on every page):
<script type="text/javascript" language="JavaScript">
// Break out of frames
if (top.location != location) {
top.location.href = document.location.href ;
}
</script>
Basically, it just compares the current document (in this case your website) to the “top” document available in the browser. If your site has been loaded via the DiggBar then the “top” document will be Digg, so they will be different. When those 2 documents are different, it will automatically redirect the entire browser to your website. Done and done.
