Craig Koster

New Blog Components

I had some time today to add a few things to this blog and wanted to write about them as they’re all pretty cool components and were really easy to set up.

Quotes

I wanted to add a section on the rightmost navigation that would pull nice quotes randomly from an external source. Today while browsing I happened upon Quotes On Design by Chris Coyier. It’s a really simple API that you include via Javascript that’ll pull nice quotes from designers around the world. I just popped the javascript into my Wordpress theme and did a little styling and it looks great and works very nicely.

Twitter

I also wanted to include a small section that would display the last Twitter status that I had posted. I actually went right to the source and grabbed a nice HTML snippet from Twitter’s HTML Widget Builder and integrated it into my Wordpress theme. It’s very easy to include and has nice hooks for styling.

Flickr

Finally, I wanted to include some thumbnails of recent photos I’ve uploaded to Flickr. I found this Wordpress plugin that pulls from Flickr and formats your images as thumbnails. With some help from this article I got things running smoothly and styled nicely into my sidebar.

All three of these were quick deploy solutions and are a great addition to any blog. If you’re using Wordpress, give them a try today.

Friday, May 29th, 2009