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

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

A few weeks ago I downloaded the Myspace & Facebook apps for my iPhone. Not because I am overly active on either of those sites, but rather just curious about the apps. To my surprise I found them very enjoyable. Much more so than going to the actual website. Gone was the advertising, and was red and blue text on black background, gone was the lame music that starts playing at full volume when I enter the page. Each time I go to the profile page. (urg! I hate that) Also gone… Advertising, pop-ups, annoying flash banners! Oh, yes this is my kind of heaven! I actually found surfing these sites a pleasure once more.

The Epiphany

Checking out these apps, a little closer, they appear to be accessing a mobile version of their sites, just made to look pretty and clean for the small browser. That's when it hit me. Hallelujah! most every mobile version of a site can be accessed via your standard web browser. This means you can access ad free, distraction free, music free versions of your favorite sites online. You do not need a mobile phone to access many sites, just a normal web browser.

With the popularity of mobile phones increasing, Most major sites offer mobile versions of their sites, the trick becomes finding the link or just guessing it. Most of the time it's just their regular domain name with a prefix of "mobile" or "m" instead of the "www". Some sites like Amazon make theirs a bit more tricky to find, and MSN does a redirect when trying to access their site on a non mobile device. Most likely to prevent people from circumventing their ad revenue. All it all it's not difficult to find these mobile versions once you know what to look for.

Links for Reference

Here are a few sites that I visit on a regular basis and have discovered that their mobile versions are better suited to a positive user experience and increased productivity over their full web versions.

• http://m.facebook.com
• http://m.myspace.com
• http://www.bbc.co.uk/mobile
• http://m.news.com
• http://m.cnn.com
• http://m.sacbee.com
• http://www.cbsmobile.com
• http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw
• http://m.youtube.com
• http://mobile.fandango.com
• http://m.netflix.com
• http://m.google.com
• http://us.m.yahoo.com
• http://weather.mobi
• http://m.wund.com

Feel free to leave a comment with links to your favorite mobile sites that you find usefull.

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.