About Marty

is a passionate web developer from Sydney, Australia. He owns about 600 websites and makes a healthy living from working the web. As a day job, he works as a pilot for an international airline. Follow Marty on Twitter or Google+.

Downtime… and our new server.

Linux

Tweet We’ve only just migrated over to our new dedicted server. Some services may experience problems in the next week or so while we code over to the new platform. Moving over to the new server gives us the opportunity to build the services (and use the resources) that simply weren’t available in the old [...]

Display Testimonials or Quotes from an XML File with WordPress Shortcode

testimonial-image

Tweet Our finance website – managed by my brother, Jason – formerly used WordPress posts (in their own category) to showcase individual customer testimonials. The creation of the individual posts for each each testimonial was a grossly inefficient solution because a visitor would have to navigate multiple pages to read individual endorsements. Of course, there’s [...]

Happy New Year

smiley-clock

Tweet I know, it’s a little late, right? Well, it’s the first time I’ve posted since November 28 last year. Quite a lot has happened over the last 4 months that precluded me from investing time into my arsenal of websites. My aviation career, consulting business and recent nuptials have all taken their toll. However, [...]

Insert YouTube Subscriber Count or Video Views in WordPress with Shortcode

YouTubeStats

Tweet We’ve previously looked at how to include YouTube video views into your WordPress post or page with shortcode; this post will show you how to include your channel’s total video view and/or subscriber count into your WordPress website. Accessing the YouTube API via the below address will reveal numerous pieces of data pertaining to [...]

Automate WordPress Posts to Twitter (with hastags, truncation and a short URL)

wordpress-twitter-oauth

Tweet Some time back I posted some basic code that would enable a message to be posted to Twitter using their oAuth platform. The naked code isn’t overly functional because it was always intended to be used from within another PHP application. This article is for those people that have emailed me asking how the [...]

Add Thumbnail Image (Links) from a YouTube RSS Feed to WordPress with Shortcode

youtube-thumbnails

Tweet I’ve got a YouTube channel associated with one of my aviation websites that isn’t – or at least wasn’t – tied to our website in any way. It adds to the fractional nature of a website that already has a disconnected reach. Since we’re currently embarking on various projects that’ll give video a huge [...]

Why You Should NEVER Post Your Email to Twitter

twitter-robot

Tweet In my quest to understand spammers, I’ve recently educated myself on a large number of techniques that they employ to search and extract emails (and other personal details) from various locations. Most disturbing is the prevalence of spammers that use various types of automated bots to pull email addresses from Twitter. This post will [...]

Resolve Short URLs To Their Destination URL with PHP (such as T.co, bit.ly & tinyurl.com)

scissors

Tweet In a few projects I’ve worked on recently, I’ve had to resolve short URLs to their destination URL. This post will show you how to: Resolve a single URL one level deep. Resolve a URL in a PHP loop until we reach a page that we deem to be the destination. Resolve multiple links [...]

Add Your Latest Google Plus Post(s) to Your WordPress Blog (or Generate a Google+ RSS Feed)

google-plus-logo

Tweet Google Plus is an awesome platform but it’s lacking in terms of the API offerings. Simply adding something such as your last post to your WordPress blog is somewhat of a chore. This post will detail how to include your latest Google+ post titles to your page using (previously provided) WordPress shortcode. Alternatively, you [...]

The favicon and WordPress Link Icon Shortcode (and an Online Image to Icon Converter)

faviconIcon

Tweet The favicon was introduced by Microsoft in 1999 as part of Internet Explorer 5. Uploaded to the root directory of a website, the small 16×16 image (or .ico file), would render in the favorites menu and URL address bar. Update, 21st May 2013: The new favicon system – based on what is described below [...]

Determine the Status of a Remote Webpage and Retrieve the HTTP Status Code

http-header-curl

Tweet The purpose of this post is to show you how to determine the status (primarily online or offline) of a remote webpage using cURL (and other methods). This post is a precursor to the article that follows, titled “Resolve Short URLs To Their Destination URL with PHP“. For the sake of it, a small [...]