Recently in WordPress Widgets Category

One of my spies pointed out to me that Timethief, one of the wonderful folks who help out on the wordpress.com support forums is celebrating her first year anniversary as a blogger today. She's also writen a series of guides on blogging basics for beginners, the use of widgets, and moving around a blog within the wordpress.com domain. I just wanted to take a second and thank her for all of her hard work over there. She's been a big help. Feel free to take a second and visit one of her blogs today. (I think I got them all.)

This one gets requested over on the Wordpress Support Forums ever so often. There's a wonderful service called Sitemeter that does free tracking of websites for you. The issue is though with WordPress.com, you can't have user inputted Javascripts as they're a security risk. (No matter what some folks say on the forums, they are.) So you were stuck with putting in the simple version which really just tracks the IP address of your visitor. Other things like browser types, OSes, etc couldn't be tracked.

Well, I wrote a WordPress widget that allowed a user to just put in their username from over at Site Meter (ie s11user) and have WordPress drop that into the Javascript itself. No javascript input by the user but they get to have the benefits of it. :)

Hope this helps,
-drmike

Download it from here. Drop it into your plugins subdirectory (If you're on WPMU, have your Site Admin drop it into your mu-plugins subdirectory.) Should show up on your Dashboard -> Presentation -> Sidebar widgets page.

edit: Friendly reminder about my laptop collection and my wishlist.

Update: Well I learned my lesson in releasing something to the WP community. Last time I do that. I've gone ahead and deleted this widget. I've tried to help folks who were having issues and followed up with their questions but folks wanted me to play guessing games and didn't want to give me any information so that I could help them. They just wasted my time and theirs. I also didn't care for those bad mouthing me elsewhere while not even asking for assistance or even reading the instructions.

I'm releasing a new set of widgets that I hacked together for daria.be. It's uses the free content from thefreedictionary.com. I modified the link contained within it because we had some issues with sidebars that forced multiple links into multiple lines.

With this set of widgets, you can add in to your theme's sidebar Quote of the Day, Word of the Day, Article of the Day, This Day in History, and Today's Birthday.

Installation instructions for WordPress: Drop it into your /plugins subdirectory. You will need WordPress Widgets installed and running of course as well as a theme that uses them.

For WordPress Multiuser, the same instructions apply. You should put the file into /mu-plugins though.

Questions? Feel free to leave a comment.

Please remember that I have a wishlist as well as a collection to purchase a laptop.

Thanks,
-drmike

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