Blog | Tom McFarlin

Excerpt Check: A WordPress Plugin for Better Excerpts

March 9, 2026 / Tom

WordPress can auto-generate excerpts by truncating your post content, but the results are rarely what you want. Incomplete sentences, leftover shortcodes, broken HTML. If you’ve ever looked at an archive page or an RSS feed and wondered why the summary looks off, that’s why.

Excerpt Check is a small plugin that prompts authors to write an excerpt before publishing or scheduling a post. It’s now available on WordPress.org.

BurnRate: Claude Code Usage at a Glance

March 2, 2026 / Tom

Two weeks ago, I was working with Opus 4.5 and, for the first time since working with Claude Code, I’d hit my limit for the model until it reset an hour later.

Yes, Claude Code has a /usage command to tell us exactly where we stand when using the project but if I have a set of agents or subagents working on something, I’d prefer not to interrupt their process to check usage. And if we stop them or stop what we’re doing to open yet another session just to check usage, it’s cumbersome.

I wanted something I could glance at without breaking focus and that’s exactly what BurnRate is.

Where Can I Watch? Now Available For iOS

February 23, 2026 / Tom

At any given time, I’ve got a number of active streaming services (some of which I rotate through during the year). Between the shows Meghan and I like to watch and the shows the kids like to watch, I don’t always know where to find what show or movie any of us are trying to find.

On top of that, this is an all too common song and dance: Someone recommends a show, I open Netflix, it’s not there. Try Hulu. Not there either. Check Disney+. Nope. It’s at a point now where I’ll drop the title in a note and maybe I’ll remember to look it up later. Or maybe not.

This happens enough so I built something to fix it. First, as a web app (which I’ve talked about), and now as an actual iOS app.

Remove Empty Shortcodes: Now with an Admin Scanner, Unit Tests, and Automated Deployment

February 16, 2026 / Tom

Back in March 2025, I wrote about reviving Remove Empty Shortcodes after letting it collect dust for a few years. At the time, I’d rewritten it, added support for multi-line shortcodes, and pushed it back to the WordPress plugin repository.

That was version 0.6.0. This is 1.0.0 and it’s a much more significant release.

Now Playing Notify: The Notifications Spotify Didn’t Ship

February 9, 2026 / Tom

Spotify is my preferred music streaming app primarily because it’s discovery algorithm is second-to-none. But there’s one thing the macOS app doesn’t do that I wish it did (and that third-party apps used to do but have since, apparently, languished): tell me what’s playing.

I spend most of my work day with music running in the background. Spotify lives somewhere behind a dozen windows, and unless I deliberately click over to it, I have no idea what track just started. Sometimes I’ll hear something and think “what is this?” then forget to check because I’m working on something else. By the time I remember, three songs have passed and it’s gone.

Yes, I know the iOS app shows a Now Playing widget. And yes, Control Center on the Mac technically shows media info. But neither of those send me a notification when a new track starts. I don’t want to check something. I want to be told.

So I built Now Playing Notify.