Every now and again I get an idea of something that I’d like to have that I’ll obsess over, but then I’ll find out that such a thing doesn’t seem to exist. Occasionally, in those instances, I’ll make those things myself, with the help of assorted robots, because I did not do well enough in my coding classes in school to write this, but I sure as hell can read what they do to make sure they’re not starting a nuclear war or some shit.

Anyway, these are those things. Feel free to jump to a particular thing, if you wanna!

Awesome Random Description Block For WordPress

You know what I hate about all social media sites? That you can only have one set of profile text. I want to make a bunch of them, and I want them to be weird, and I want them to swap out at random whenever someone loads the page, dang it, because I’m super-fun.

And y’know what, if I wasn’t going to get that on a social media site, then I sure as heck was going to make that happen on my own damn website. So I made a Gutenberg block to do it — if you refresh this page, you’ll see the text below change between three different options on each load:

The plugin allows you to manually add taglines in the Block Settings sidebar, or you can import a CSV of taglines if you’ve got so many that you don’t feel like typing them in. Additionally, if you want to export those taglines, that’s also in the Block Settings sidebar. It’s kinda neat!

If you’d like to download it and use it on your own site, you can find the Awesome Random Description Block plugin on GitHub here.

The core WordPress Separator block is fine, I guess, if you want just a bunch of straight lines and boxes and shit on your site like a boring person. That ain’t me, though — I wanted squiggles! And zigzags! And squiggles and zigzags that could be animated, going either direction!

What I didn’t want was for this to be a whole thing — it seemed silly to build out a whole new block when there was a perfectly good Separator block right there that I could build upon. So I did! This adds a few styles to the Separator block — styles for Static Squiggle, Animated Squiggle, Static Zigzag, Animated Zigzag and, by special request, Static and Animated Sparkles.

There’s options to adjust the width of the line, the amplitude of the wave, and the speed of the animation. You can use them in Group and Column blocks, to make the same sorta weird lines next to text like I have at the top of each page of this site, or you can just throw ’em out there like you would any Separator block. And it’s not adding a ton of nonsense to your site that will slow things down and ruin your PageSpeed scores, presuming Google isn’t being a monster and counting SVGs as a problem this week or something.

If you want to add a bit more whimsy to your own spot on the interweb, you can download the Awesome Squiggle Plugin from GitHub here.

Awesome Code Snippets Pro Max for WordPress

There’s a plugin called Code Snippets that lets you run code on your WordPress site, as if it was coming from your theme’s functions.php file, which can add all sorts of neato stuff to your site. There was another plugin, formerly known as Insert Headers & Footers, which would (brace yourselves) let you insert code in the headers or footers of your website, which is great for assorted analytics code, ad code insertion, whatever. They did their jobs super-well and are great!

But then they started adding a ton of extra functionality, software-as-a-service subscription things, mostly. They both decided they wanted to be the One Plugin to Rule Them All, and that’s fine, but I didn’t find Code Snippet’s ability to add headers and footers very good, and Insert Headers & Footers code snippets were meh. I get needing to monetize your business — not everything can be free forever! — but I was getting kinda annoyed at this whole thing.

Eventually, I got so annoyed that I had Claude one-shot a plugin to do this for me, which is now all up on GitHub — you can snag it for yourself here if you don’t need the fancier pro features of the other plugins and whatnot!

Awesome Comic Converter

A while back, Amazon decided that they were going to close the loophole that allowed you to download your Kindle books, which also allowed you to remove the DRM from ’em so you could use them anywhere, ’cause Amazon is, and I mean this in the most polite and not-legally-actionable way, a buttface.

What wasn’t as clear was that this also applied to any comics you purchased off of Comixology — if you downloaded the files through the method linked above (which no longer works, obviously), you might also get a bunch of comics you had purchased. Problem was, you could convert those files to have no DRM, but there was no good way to convert them to a CBZ file, which is the most common format for digital comics (to my knowledge, anyway).

So I made one. ‘Cause I wasn’t going to not have All-Star Superman wherever I want it to be, y’know? If you’re in the same boat that I was, you can run it from here — everything is processed locally in your own browser, so no worries about that. And, hey, if you wanna confirm that, you can view the source code (and/or download it to run on your own server!) from GitHub.

Awesome Backlink Metadata Updater for Obsidian

I track everything in Obsidian: meetings I’ve had, TV or movies I’ve watched, what restaurants I’ve eaten at, the whole-ass deal, ’cause the ADHD is not gonna let me remember things longer-term if I don’t write ’em down. Problem is, in order to track that information required some finicky Dataview queries on the entry for those aforementioned TV/Movies/Restaurants/People I’ve Met With, and the Dataview queries to pull all those into one big table was annoying at best.

With the launch of Obsidian’s new super-delightful Bases feature that I love so very very much, I wanted to get that data into the file’s metadata, but didn’t want to have to update the lastWatch or lastVisit or lastMeeting metadata by hand, because who has that kind of time, there’s so many procedurals to watch on TV for crying out loud! So, instead of doing that, I built a plugin to do it for me.

In the settings for the plugin, you can set the folders for the plugin to watch, and where the files that it should update are, and then it gets to updating that for you from that point forward. Even better, it can backfill that information from your previous notes, too (although DEAR GOD BACKUP YOUR VAULT BEFORE DOING THAT (or any other mass-update procedure)).

You can install the plugin with the BRAT plugin for now, and when I’ve done more testing on it, I’ll probably submit it to the Obsidian plugin repository, too!