I stood up in a couple of weddings last month (you know who you are). I never thought I would actually use my cameraphone, but it does come in handy sometimes. Here are two great examples (and a good excuse to show off the new WP plugin, Lightbox JS)
Happy Jeebus is way, way, way too creepy.
While working on a new Wordpress Plugin (which will be available soon, BTW) I became an Amazon Associate. Basically, this means that I will reap pennies upon pennies of profit from clicks that end in purchases from amazon.com.
So if you are planning to buy something from amazon anyway, look for it using the search box in the right column over there. It looks something like this:
As far as the yet-to-be-named WP Plugin is concerned, it is a chopped up version of Nick Leeper’s WP iTunes. Combined with iTunesBlogger, the blog author’s recently played itunes can be displayed on their WP blog. Cover art is pulled from the amazon.com database, and clicking the art for each item will open the itunes store on the user’s computer, directing them to the specific song. Pretty Neat.
In my modified version, instead of opening iTunes, a window is opened to the amazon.com page for the album. In the case where the album name is unknown, an amazon search page is opened, searching the music divison of amazon by the artist name. These pages include a refrence to the blog owner’s amazon assoicate id, so they will get credit for the sale. In addition, the price of any known album is pulled form the XML and displayed. It should have a name and a release soon. Any name suggestions?
With my WordPress theme (a bastardized version of Kubrick’s), there is this small area on the top of the sidebar that is empty in several situations. When you are viewing an archive, that area is filled with a message outlining what you are currently viewing. However, when you are on common pages like the main page or looking at a single post, nothing is there but blank space.
I started looking around for something to put in there, and finally settled on using the Deep Thoughts plugin Jen outlined in her post “jappler’s wordpress”. (a great guide to some cool plugins)
I installed and activated the plugin, and called it in the sidebar.php code using an else statement, so that in any situation where there was nothing in that space, there would now be a JH quote. Everything worked great. One problem, I am too impatient to wait 24 hours for a new quote. So I modified the code a little and created my first WordPress plugin.
The Random Thoughts plugin is essentially the same code as the Deep Thoughts Plugin by Valerie Holifield. The difference is, instead of checking the day of the year and displaying the corresponding deep thought, it just displays a random one.
To use the random thoughts plugin…
1.) Download the randomthoughts.zip file
2.) Extract randomthoughts.php and put it in your plugins directory
3.) Activate the plugin in your site admin
4.) Call the function from any page using ‘< ?php randomthoughts(); ?>‘