random.geek() » Blogging

WordPress Widget – Amazon Wishlists

Ben Coleman — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 11:21:46 +0000

I wanted to show my Amazon wishlist on my blog, actually I have a custom ‘wishlist’ on Amazon, listing what I’m currently playing – it was that I really wanted to show.

So I thought Amazon will provide that as an RSS feed and I’ll embed it in, no problems. No. They don’t, no idea why this obvious and useful feature is not provided! Grrrrr

To cut a long story short I found nothing out there that would do this (and worked for the Amazon UK site) so I knocked up a quick WordPress plugin to do it. You can see it in use on my site.

Features:

Show small/medium/large images for the items in your wishlist
Links through to Amazon
Include your Affiliate ID (If you have one)#
Supports all Amazon locales (US, UK, France, Germany, Canada, Japan)

Usage:

Install as you would any other standard WordPress Plugin
Go to: Design -> Widgets and add the widget to your sidebar
Set the options as required, note the List ID is a required field

How to Find your Amazon wishlist ID:

Logon to Amazon and click the “Gifts & Wishlists” link near the top
Click Wishlist
In the “Your Wishlists” section on the right click the relevant wishlist
The ID will be in the URL of the page, e.g. /gp/registry/wishlist/2GMNFC0FKPU37/ref=cm_wl_rlist_go

Download – WordPress Amazon Wishlist Plugin v1.0

Flickr Widget Plugin for Your WordPress Sidebar

Ben Coleman — Sat, 27 Jan 2007 15:41:53 +0000

This is plugin I wrote for the Widget Sidebar in WordPress. It will display your flickr photos in your blog’s sidebar.
It’s basically a wrapper round the badge functionality that flickr provide and publish. I’ve ported this from the Joomla module I wrote ages ago, it took no time at all and it’s working fine (see over on the right – my sad photos) – let me know if you run into any problems using it.

Download
Download the plugin here – Flickr Widget Plugin v1.0

Update
Dec 2007 – I’m no longer supporting or updating this code. I no longer use flickr, I’m no longer working with WordPress and I have far too many other demands on my time. However by all means feel free to download and use my widget but I will not be able to help with any problems or deal with any feature requests. Sorry! The code is there for you to tweak/change etc if you want to.

Requirements
WordPress 2.x or higher – http://wordpress.org/ (it might work on older versions but I’ve not tested it)
Sidebar Widgets Plugin – http://automattic.com/code/widgets/
Please install this plugin and get it working before installing mine.

Installation
Download and extract the flickr-widget.php file into your wp-content/plugins/widgets/ directory
Goto your wordpress admin pages and click on ‘Plugins’ activate the plugin called “Flickr Badge Widget”

Configuration
Goto your wordpress admin page and click on ‘Presentation’ then ‘Sidebar Widgets’
Drag the widget called “Flickr Badge” to your sidebar.
Click the square icon next to the widget to open the config screen.

The following options are available

Widget Title:	The title that will appear in the sidebar, optional
Source:	Where to pick the photos from; can be a specific user, a group pool or all of flickr (everyone). Most people will select the “User” option to show their own photos
Flickr ID:	If showing photos from a user or group enter the ID here, Use http://idgettr.com/ to find your ID as it’s a bit hard to find by yourself. Note. This is NOT your flickr username, entering your username will not work. The ID will look something like 65706086%40N00 but don’t use that ID as it’s mine!
Tag:	Use this if the selected source is (Tag) to only show photos with this tag
Photo Count:	Number of photos to show
Layout:	Layout orientation of the photos
Which Photos:	How to select the photos to display; either randomly or the newest photos
Photo Size:	Size of the photos displayed in the sidebar
Alignment:	Alignment of the section (div) containing the photos

Picasa Sidebar Widget

Ben Coleman — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 15:06:11 +0000

I’ve been trying get a decent sidebar widget to display my Picasa photos on my WordPress blog for some time now. I found this one over at Vague Dream. It was working fine until I stumbled upon a few bugs:

Photos with spaces in the name would not be displayed
Photos with dots in the name would cause the page to render the JPEG as the HTML source – i.e. gibberish.
Multiple feeds on Windows wouldn’t work

I’ve found the source of all these bugs and fixed them! You can see the output of this fixed plugin here on this very blog; over on the right in the section called Pictures. So here is an updated version of the plugin…
NOTE. This plugin is not all my work, it’s simply a bug fixed version of the one at Vague Dream they did all the hard work of creating and writing the plugin.

Download Updated Picasa Widget Plugin (26-01-2007)

Testing Office 2007

Ben Coleman — Sat, 18 Nov 2006 18:12:33 +0000

Wow looks like Office 2007 has blogging support built in.
Very nice. This post was created in Word 2007 and published direct to my blog.

I like this.

Picasa Web

Ben Coleman — Tue, 20 Jun 2006 19:34:55 +0000

So I’ve tried Google’s new flickr beating web photo offering thingy ‘Picasa Web Albums‘…
Not very good is it. Now I know it’s a a pre-beta test and all that, but they have sooo far to go before they are anywhere close to what flickr offers.

Oh well it’s definitely one to keep an eye on; but 9 out of 10 for effort Google, 2 out of 10 achievement