It’s possible to include a Lua interpreter in a program built with pretty much any imaginable language…including PHP. There is a convenient PHP class, called phplua, that will allow you to do this.

phplua is a PHP extension that enables you to embed the LUA interpreter in a PHP application. Huh? A script language embedded in a script language? This is probably what you are asking yourself now. But imagine you have an application and want to allow users to customize it using some API. PHP will be sufficient if you are the webmaster and want to extend a foreign application by a separate module. But you certainly do NOT want to give an ordinary web user of this application the ability to inject their own PHP code. PHP is simply not designed to do this. At least not in a secure way.

If you have a complex web application that could do with a little bit of user customization, it’s definitely possible to bake in a Lua API. The question is: if you did that, would it make Lua a meta-scripting language?

Why are they doing this? To solve two problems that URL shorteners often introduce: The first being that they prevent you from seeing what URL you’re going to land on, which could contain malware of some other undesirable content. Having a private, branded shortener domain adds a level of trust. The second issue is that a few URL shorteners have closed their doors, or announced that they were going to. Handling them internally helps to mitigate that risk, since everything is under the publishers’ control.

How do you set up your own URL shortener? The first step is to get a short domain to use. Domai.nr is a great tool to provide inspiration. Once you have a domain, however, you have to make a decision. Do you want to use something like Bit.ly Pro, or do you want to host everything yourself? If you fall into the latter camp, you may want to give YOURLS a try.

YOURLS, or Your Own URL Shortener, is a PHP script by WordPress plugin developers Lester “Gamerz” Chan and Ozh Richard. It lets you setup a nearly-instant URL shortener. All you have to do is download and configure it on your web server. It even collects statistics.

You can set YOURLS up to be either private or public, and it includes features you would usually expect from a third-party URL shortener, such as:

• A bookmarklet that you can use to create new short URLs
• An API that you can use to add YOURLS support to applications like Tweetie 2.
• Click reports, referrer tracking, visitors’ approximate geo location.
• The ability to pick custom keywords instead of using sequential URLs.

There’s even a plugin that you can use to integrate YOURLS into WordPress. But if you want an alternative plugin, one that provides more Twitter-oriented features, my Tweetable plugin now supports YOURLS.

I now have my own shortener powered by YOURLS, ntgo.us, which I intend to eventually use across my various websites.

Installation is quick and painless, a simple matter of uploading the files and running the 5-step installation wizard. It checks to make sure the prerequisites (PHP 5.2, GD, SimpleXML) are met and then prompts for your MySQL credentials. Once that’s taken care of, it asks you for a username and password for the admin account, then lets you optionally set up a watermark that will be added to your images. The final step lets you batch-add a folder full of images, though you can put that off until later.

Managing your images with PowerGallery is a breeze. You can simply drag and drop the thumbnails to reorder them, and it only takes a couple of clicks to rotate them if need be. Editing metadata is intuitive: a simple matter of selecting a thumbnail and tweaking the text fields to the right.

You have two options when it comes to uploading images: either do one at a time, or FTP several to a server directory and import them all at once.

There are several layout options for your galleries. You can have a grid of thumbnails that open the full-size image in a Lightbox overlay when clicked, a thumbnail grid with the full-size image displayed above, or you can have either configuration, but with a “ribbon” of thumbnails instead of a grid. The options are available in both light and dark color schemes.

Galleries can be linked to directly, or you can get snippets of PHP code to embed them directly into an existing page.

The finished product looks good, and functions like you would expect any image gallery to. It would work well for a portfolio, product photos, or whatever your needs are.

PowerGallery is a great software package, and its only real drawback is the price. It costs $99.99 for an unlimited-site license, though it’s discounted to $69.99 until the end of December. I think the normal asking price is a little steep for many individuals, though businesses should have no issue, but PowerGallery is a great option for those who can afford it.

The compressed download is under one megabyte, and the installation looks fairly simple. Just upload via FTP, and run the installation script.

The installed gallery is responsive and clean. Don’t take my word for it, though. Look at the demo gallery.

The script is fairly new, and is still evolving. Some features, like RSS support, have just been added.

If you need a gallery (for a design portfolio, to show off your photos, etc), then be sure to check-out Zenphoto.

With a poll, a user can just click a button to give you their two cents. Meanwhile, it takes a lot more effort to leave a comment. Which do you think your readers prefer? While comments allow them to say anything they want, polls enable a quick multiple-choice response (which can be very useful). Also, I’ve found that blog posts with attached polls tend to generate more comments.

Once you decide you need a poll, you need to actually add one. You have plenty of choices for implementing your poll. Here are a few of the better services/scripts:

Hosted Solutions

• PollDaddy – A cool-looking AJAX poll. There are several styles available, as well as custom CSS.
  
• Toluna (formerly dPolls) – A poll service with a bunch of social-networking-style features tacked-on.
  

WordPress Plugins

• WP-Polls
  
• Democracy AJAX Poll
  

PHP (AJAX)

• FPoll – A simplistic polling script with an admin panel for easy poll management.
  
• AJAX Poller – Customizable, and has an animated graph for the results.
  

roScripts has changed a lot since their launch, and they keep getting better.

For those of you who have never heard of the term “lightbox,” it’s a photographic term that has been recycled for web use. A lightbox, in the photographic sense, is a device used for viewing negatives. In the web design area, “lightbox” refers to a script that displays images or other content in an overlay DIV.

Which Lightbox is right for you? This post will help you figure that out.

You enter a sites’ URL into the form, and the applet puts a black dot on the screen (representing the root <html> element). Quickly, more connected dots expand outward. Each dot is color-coded to match a group of elements. The blue dots are links, the red ones are tables, etc. The graph shown to the right shows this site (note the lack of red dots ).

It’s fun to enter a bunch of your favorite websites and compare them (maybe it is a toy rather than a useful tool…), and compare them to your own as well. Try it out, it’s fun to watch if anything.

What is SimplePie? It’s a file you include in your PHP scripts, allowing you instant access to RSS-parsing capabilities. You can display RSS headlines/items on your website, combine several feeds into one, and anything else that you can think of. If you know a little PHP, the possibilities are endless.

You see this PHP code:

require('simplepie.inc');
$feed = new SimplePie("http://feeds.feedburner.com/Webmaster-source");
$feed->handle_content_type();
echo "<h1>".$feed->get_title()."</h1>";
foreach ($feed->get_items() as $item) {
echo '<h2><a href="'.$item->get_permalink().'">';
echo $item->get_title().'</a></h2>';
echo '<p>'.$item->get_description().'</p>';
}

That’s all you need to display a feed’s headlines and descriptions. Of course, that was only a simple example. It’s unbelievable what you can do with SimplePie.

Over at NTugo, SimplePie is used extensively. The MyNT RSS reader is powered by SimplePie. The “Recent blog posts” and “Recent posts from the NTugo Network” boxes on the home page are built with SimplePie. The RSS feed aggregated from all of the NTugo blogs? SimplePie again! It’s amazing what you can do with SimplePie.

If you know PHP, you’ll definitely want to take a look at SimplePie.

Ah, the RSS reader. Like with web browsers and email clients, everyone has a different preference. Some like desktop programs, while others like web-based apps. There’s no shortage of choices. You have Feedreader, Netvibes, Bloglines, etc. I don’t like any of the choices. I’m a big fan of RSS, but I’ve never really liked any RSS reader other than Firefox‘s Live Bookmarks feature. Recently I’ve had two problems. Number one, my feed collection outgrew Live Bookmarks. Number two, I’ve often wanted to read my RSS feeds on other computers.

What did I do? I threw together my own web-based RSS reader. I call it MyNT (say “Mint”), which is short for My NTugo. It’s a little innovative, as I added a few…different features to it.

My favorite feature: You can read your RSS feeds without logging in at all (just go to http://my.ntugo.com/yourusername.html). Just bookmark that URL and you can check your feeds with a single click (let’s see Bloglines do that).

Take a look at MyNT, you may like it. I can’t guarantee everyone will like MyNT. After all, I made it mainly for myself (and anyone who thinks that most feed readers are too bloated). I wanted to capture the simplicity of Live Bookmarks in a different form, and I think I did a pretty good job at it.

Well, MyNT’s URL is http://my.ntugo.com, and you can read the official press-release-sort-of-thing here.