Blog | Tom McFarlin

Mute Menu Notifications: A WordPress Plugin for Silencing Update Badges

April 27, 2026 / Tom

I wrote this plugin a few years ago to scratch a personal itch: those red notification badges in the WordPress admin menu were more annoying than not while I was trying to focus on other things. (I knew I had updates to complete but I do them on my own schedule and didn’t want the visual noise whenever I was working on something else.)

The original version was a single-file plugin that got the job done, but only good enough. It worked by hiding badges with JavaScript after the page loaded, which meant you’d see them flash for a split second on every page. The toggle was a site-wide option, so if one admin muted notifications, every admin lost them. And the AJAX call used GET for a state-changing action, which was more of a quick hack to get it working than anything else.

So I rebuilt it from scratch. This is version 2.0.0.

Where Can I Watch? 1.2.0: Episode Tracking and More

April 20, 2026 / Tom

Where Can I Watch? started off as an app with a single purpose: tell me what service is streaming a show or movie. But the more I used the app (and the more a few users contacted me), the more it made sense to also track all of the shows and movies that are being watched. And with shows, there are obviously multiple episodes and, for most, multiple seasons.

So in the latest version, in addition to fixing a few things, I added per-season episode tracking. 1.2.0 has shaped up to be the biggest feature release since the initial launch of the app.

BurnRate 1.4.0: It Updates Itself Now

April 13, 2026 / Tom

A few weeks back I shipped BurnRate. It’s a small macOS menu bar app that shows your Claude Code usage limits at a glance. It had a solid enough response and a some people dug it enough to use it daily (myself included, of course).

But there’s a problem: how do those people know when there’s a new version?

The answer, until now, was “they don’t.” They’d have to check in with me or the product page or just stumble into it.

Not exactly ideal

Now Playing Notify 1.1.0: Act on What’s Playing

April 6, 2026 / Tom

Version 1.0.0 aimed to solve a single problem: knowing what track just started without switching to Spotify. Occasionally though, there are times throughout the day I want to share a song with someone.

So in the latest build, I added a couple of additional features the most significant of which is to make it easier to grab a link to the currently playing song.

TuneLink: Easily Convert Music Links Between Spotify and Apple Music

March 30, 2026 / Tom

A friend sends you a Spotify link. You’re an Apple Music subscriber. You tap it, Spotify opens (or the App Store depending no your setup), and now you’re searching for the song manually. Or someone in a group chat drops an Apple Music link and half the group can’t use it. It’s a small friction, but it happens (at least in my group chats).

TuneLink fixes this. Share a link from one service, get the equivalent on the other and it’s automatically added to your clipboard.