Visual28-Personal Blog of Mark Aplet - Design, web, and other topics

It's been a busy month for me so I haven't had much time to write any articles for visual28. I hope I can change that soon. I have some topics all lined up, but I really need to do some additional research before I post them.  I do have some news that I wanted to put out to you all. I have made some small updates to the twitter and flickr plugins for Mango Blog. Mostly to improve flexibility of the plugin for various themes, but also fixed a few small bugs. So if you haven't yet given it a try or found that it didn't work for you, give it go and download them. Get the Flickr Plugin Here, or the Twitter Plugin Here.

Back when I used BlogFusion as a CMS, it had a very simple utility called notes. Its function was simple.  It added a note to your sidebar. I found this really useful when you need to alert your users to a new update or some problem without having to create a blog post about it. I wanted that feature back in mango blog so I created a very simple plugin called SideNote. It allows you to add html to your sidebar so you can use it however you want. Use SideNote to add an alert about upcoming maintenance or an outage, or maybe you need a donate now button? It's up to you.

It's currently a beta right now, because I am not aware of any issues when adding advanced HTML or javascript. So far I have not had any issues, but I tend to use only basic HTML and CSS. Let me know if you find any issues with it.

Download SideNote Here.

Installation

To install this plugin copy the entire sideNote folder to your "components/plugins/user/" folder

I think that just about everybody has a flickr account, and many of us want to put our photos on our blogs. Be it family photos or screen shots of video games and websites — they add visual interest to our web site designs and engage our readers. I know, Mango Blog already has a flickrWidget, but I didn't really like the slideshow and wanted to see a group of thumbnails instead. So I built my own plugin. Now you Mango Blog owners have an option for putting your flickr Pics onto your site.

Features

The flickrPics plugin has some great features not available in all plugins yet. This plugin is pod-enabled so you can set it's position within your sidebar in the admin. This is also the first plugin that supports Caching. Thanks to Adam Tuttle for writing the cache script that he will publish later this week on his site Fusion Grokker. Caching the feeds from these plugins will increase performance of your blog and will be less likely to return an error if those site go offline for any length of time.

This Cache feature is something I will also be adding to the twitter plugin later this week.

Configuration Settings

I tried to pack several useful features into flickrPics to give you flexibility to make it work in as many themes as possible. When you configure the flickrPics plugin you have a few options available.

Tags: allow you to perform a search through your photos for particular tags. This is a comma separated list and works the same as it would like the flicker search.

Photos to Display: A numerical value for the number of images you want to show at a time.

Photo Size: Square thumbnails, and medium thumbnails are the only two options at the moment. I am looking into other options for future updates.

Custom Header: Allows you to specify a custom H2 title.

Image Wrappers: There are two extra fields "before image" and "after image" that allow you to wrap your images in custom elements like <p> tags or a <br> tag.

Download the plugin

The flickrPics plugin is free to download so get it now, and please provide me your feedback for it's usefulness, and suggestions for improvements.