

HN Show & Tell: the WordPress Console - sant0sk1

Awhile back, raganwald created a thread with the sole purpose of discussing what the community is hacking on. Not start-ups and/or business, but just hacking on for fun in our spare time. I really enjoyed that conversation and would like to have more like it.<p>With that goal in mind, I suggest we use Saturdays to highlight our open-source and/or side projects that we're working on. Saturday seems like a logical fit since it is generally a slow news day, and what better time to talk about our "weekend projects" than the weekend?<p>So, to get the proverbial ball rolling, I submit to you my most recent side project which I released earlier this week, the WordPress Console.<p>http://blog.jerodsanto.net/2009/06/introducing-the-wordpress-console/<p>If you've developed in Rails then you know the joy of script/console. I have been writing a lot of WordPress plugins for clients lately, and wanted a way to interact with the development environment similar to how I can when writing a Rails app. This desire resulted in the WordPress Console, which is a plugin that creates an in-browser shell where you can execute arbitrary PHP code with the full WordPress env loaded.<p>It isn't a huge technical achievement or even all that challenging to create, but it is kinda cool, imo. The project is also still wet behind the ears, but usable.<p>What do you think? Worth developing further? Have ideas to make it more awesome? Anybody want to join in and hack on it with me?
======
sant0sk1
This thread, now with clickable links!

official plugin page: <http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-console/>

announcement blog post (w/ screencast):
[http://blog.jerodsanto.net/2009/06/introducing-the-
wordpress...](http://blog.jerodsanto.net/2009/06/introducing-the-wordpress-
console/)

source code on GitHub: <http://github.com/sant0sk1/wordpress-console/>

~~~
tonystubblebine
I love this. You're so right that every development environment should have a
great console.

------
euroclydon
I want to make a site called: ratemysyllabi.com where users can submit, into a
categorized database, course syllabuses for any topic. Other users will
comment and rank them. The purpose would be to provide learning guidelines for
everyone in one central place, rather then their current scattering across
various university wensites, and to take a step toward an open-source
university.

The data structure would be rigid, not just document uploads, but field-by-
field entry in order to maintain consistent structure, searchability, and to
quickly move miscategorized data.

I am becoming a skeptic of the utility and value of a four year degree. In
particular the way the tax-exempt "public" money is spent and allocated. I
think Wick Sloane makes a pretty strong case for the antiquity and corruption
in the modern university system in this Thomas Paine style essay:

[http://www.insidehighered.com/content/download/229351/290798...](http://www.insidehighered.com/content/download/229351/2907983/file/CommonSense.pdf)

~~~
tonystubblebine
I think this is a great idea and has much bigger potential. One of the themes
in publishing right now is that the money has gone out of content, since there
aren't enough people willing to pay but that there's still good opportunities
in curating (for example what hacker news does).

What if these syllabi were made up of free blogs and articles, like Spolsky's
Best Software Writing.

------
tonystubblebine
I launched a side project the other day to let you post longer messages to
Twitter. You write whatever you want and then it updates your twitter with a
summary and short url to the entire message.

I have it up as lngtwt, but I think I'm going to launch it officially as
big.ly.

<http://lngtwt.com>

My particular use case is that I often want to respond to someone on twitter
with a longer message and I don't have convenient access to their email or
want my response to be public. This comes up all the time in support. There
will be a bug that is being discussed publicly on twitter and I want to send
those people a solution in a way that anyone following the discussion can see.

Here are two examples:

<http://twitter.com/tonystubblebine/statuses/2349633865>

<http://twitter.com/tonystubblebine/statuses/2244340758>

One thing I like about small side projects is that it lets you start with
fresh code, which is helpful for testing out plugins. This one uses the Rails
twitter-auth module, which was really easy to setup.

------
bkrausz
I just got really interested in making a Domino's Boxee ordering/status app,
but I need to teach myself Python and figure out how to work it into their
API.

~~~
scott_s
<http://diveintopython.org/>

------
daeken
Writing a language spec and prototype compiler for a new language, Ultilang
(the name is by no means final). A few friends and myself came together and
developed a list of features we would have to have for a one-size-fits-all
language, and it's been designed from there.

Brace-based syntax parsed into an s-exp; real macros operating on this
expression tree; multiple backends (CLR, JVM, Python at the very least);
strongly typed and type inferred, with optional dynamic typing; no difference
between statement and expression context (so nested structures a la Nemerle
are supported); Nemerle-style pattern matching.

The goal is to build a fairly small language on top of existing frameworks,
and let users fill in the gaps with strong metaprogramming. We'll see how it
goes.

------
aneesh
I'm a sports fan in general, and a cricket fan in particular. I've been
working on a structured data repository for cricket matches to facilitate
sabermetric-type analyses.

Repository: <http://data.againstthespin.com>

~~~
sidmitra
wasn't aware of sabermetrics before you mentioned it!

~~~
aneesh
It's a very cool field, and it's been around for longer than most people would
think. Follow @againstthespin on twitter if you want to get my (infrequent)
thoughts on the subject. And read _Moneyball_ by Michael Lewis if you want a
brilliant writer's thoughts on the subject.

------
cturner
Writing a shell on a java application platform with the principle that
"everything is a filesystem". Shell is really mininal - just enough to browse
the application, launch an editor and trigger simple programs in jvm languages
like js, objective-j, jython, ioke and whatever else they like.

Achievements so far? I now have the beginnings of a shell, filesystem API
(that was pretty simple), and a jython implementation of ed with basic
functionality but some bugs. :)

------
sidmitra
I was making a tinyurl clone in appengine that opens multiple urls. Silly
really, but i hadn't seen that done before and i thought it would be useful.
But i just saw this (<http://fur.ly/>) today :-(

------
tptacek
A 24"x18" poster for Black Hat, my BH talk (vulnerabilities in stock exchange
order handling systems and trading protocols in general), and helped Chris and
Mike with their BH paper (Ruby for penetration testers).

------
abyssknight
I'm working on getting re-motivated and attempting to avoid burnout at work.
I'm also trying to get a side project up and running in Django with a coworker
of mine. Just installed gitosis and created the first repo, so its time to
write spec and check some code in. Hopefully we can put one of my old domains
to good use. :)

------
mitchellh
I launched a side project to help out UW students: <http://uwrobot.com>

And a ruby interface to the U of W student portal:
<http://github.com/mitchellh/RubyUW/tree/master>

Fun fun fun.

------
nibrahim
I'm spending my free hours trying to write a Steampunk themed vertical shooter
game using PyGame. The code is at

<http://github.com/nibrahim/Xenon-Retroblast/tree/master>

------
csomar
"Not start-ups and/or business, but just hacking on for fun in our spare
time."

Hacking for fun means, we code on things we like. If we try to find an idea on
how to make them useful, this will be much more better. What do you think?

------
ddemchuk
I'm 90% done with a Rails app for social book summaries. It allows people to
search for books, add a short summary (less than 500 words), and choose their
favorite summaries for each book. Over time, each book will have the highest
rated summary attached to it.

I'm not trying to pull a Fahrenheit 451 and diminish the value of books, I
just got really annoyed during finals last semester when I was trying to look
up book summaries for books I had already read to refresh my memory and
everything I found was longer than necessary. I just want something quick and
simple.

