Ministry of Silly Plugins

It’s been too serious lately, and this is the last (planned) post for the year, so what are your favorite, totally useless, plugins?

I wrote one. Rickroll – Changes ever video to RickRoll. It’s useless, pointless, and funny. I don’t actually know anyone who uses it.

For IE6 users, there’s Graceless Degradation which just punishes IE6 users with Comic Sans. Speaking of, there’s also Comic Sans which does it for everyone and Comic Sans FTW which is when you need it on your admin dashboard.

Not enough color? Suzette likes Nyan Cat. Just a great big NYAN on the screen. Otto wrote Unicornify which makes your gravatars Unicorns (and would Gravatar please buy/absorb them and make them real? Please? More gravatar options needed!). Similarly he wrote Rainbowify, for the gaudiest toolbar ever.

Need more snark? My snarky friend Andrew likes Get Snarky – one of the goofiest “Hello Dolly” replacements out there.

Want to live dangerously? Logout Roulette will randomly log you out! One chance in ten is way better than traditional Russian Roulette of course.

Finally, how about a good old fart joke? Farticles farts while you scroll.

Someone might ask “What is the point of these plugins?” To them I say “The same as for Hello Dolly.”

The point of a plugin isn’t always to do awesome things and make your site have every feature it needs. It’s also to demonstrate the exponential extendability of WordPress. To show you the myriad ways you can take a site and make it wonderful. If learning by being silly is what it takes, then by all means, make a silly plugin! A silly plugin, much like the intentionally evil plugins I like to make, serve the same sort of purpose. Teaching people how to do things in a better way.

A silly plugin is way less terrifying than an evil one, though I tried to keep my evil down to a low level of annoying rather than truly evil. You can take the bones of either kind of plugin and legitimately do things that really are not in anyone’s best interests, but you can also take them to see how everything is put together in WordPress.

How have you learned from weird, silly, code?

Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

I’m Mika (aka Ipstenu) and I’m complicated. I’ve been on the net since the days of dedicated terminals and Novation CAT modems and solved Missionaries and Cannibals (or Goats and Cabbages) before I was six, and blog about WordPress and technical/computer things at Half Elf on Tech.

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