blogintroduction-wordpress-plugin

This is a plugin that brings up a little preview of a site into the widget-less sidebar. If you want to use this in a widget-enabled theme, give blogintroduction-wordpress-widget a chance. The link is chosen by random out of the links in the WordPress link-manager. You can specify a single link-category or use all categories for the random-link-base.

You can also decide to show invisible/private links. This is for the case you want to show links as a preview you don’t want to show in the linkroll.

If you want and if there is a description for the link done in the link-description-field it would be shown.

A refreshing via AJAX could be enabled with a specific time (in seconds) when the next thumbnail would be loaded.

This plugin uses the websnapr-Service for generating the thumbnail-images. Keep their term of use in mind. You should get an API-Key for free from there to use this widget and get more then 80 snapshots per hour, with key it would be about 340 per hour (250.000 a month).

Since Version 0.3.0 you could also use the image-link stored in the link-manager for containing the link to the preview-image. If no link is given the widget would use websnapr as fall back.

If you want to leave a feedback, feel free to do this on the plugin’s homepage of the author’s blog. Though the pages are in german, comments in english are wellcome, too.

1. Upload blogintroduction-wordpress-plugin.php and blogintroduction-wordpress-plugin_ajax.php to the /wp-content/plugins/blogintroduction-wordpress-plugin directory
2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
3. Add the call to the function plugin_blogintroduction_getBlogintroduction() at the place in the sidebar you want to show it
4. Configure your plugin using the admin-page

The configuration is a simple thing:

• Websnapr-API-Key: Here you could put in your API-Key. It’s not necessary to fill this field for running the widget but its better to keep in mind with the term of use I think.
• Image-width: The value is a the number of pixels of the image-width in the sidebar. This parameter correspondents to the width-value in the html-img-tag.
• Image-height: The value is a the number of pixels of the image-height in the sidebar. This parameter correspondents to the height-value in the html-img-tag.
• use4:1-ratio: If checked, height would be well-sized to a 4:3-ratio corresponding to the width-value. Given height above would be ignored then.
• Image-source: Here you could chose from where the preview-image would be loaded: From websnapr or from a location given by the Image-URL in the link-manager.
• Link-category: Here you could chose the category of the links that would be the source for the random-links.
• Link-target: Simply means link-target. So where the link should be opened. “Im neuen Fenster” means in a new window, “Im aktuellen Fenster” means in the actual window of the browser.
• Show description: If the checkbox is checked, the link-description in the link-manager would be shown with a Label “Description” (depending on the translation).
• Show private links: Check this box to show private-links.
• Show new thumbnail in … seconds: Here you enable the auto-renew-function, that means, every x seconds depending on the value you enter in the box on the right side, a new thumbnail would be shown. The minimum time is 10 seconds to avoid heavy traffic and other problems.

Where could I leave a comment or a question relating the plugin?

If you want to leave a feedback, feel free to do this on the plugin’s homepage of the author’s blog. Though the pages are in german, comments or questions in english are wellcome, too.

Sometimes I see thumbnails containing an error 404 or “bad request” or something, what’s about this?

If you see thumbnails containing some errors the cause lies at websnapr itself. I don’t know, how they produce the thumbnails but it’s not in my hands to fix this subject.

Version 0.3.0: * Image-Source chooseable * Fixed issue with image-height * Version-number-gap caused by synchronizing with codebase of blogintroduction-wordpress-widget

Version 0.0.1:

• Initial shot.