If you know me, you know I’m a nut for college-football. A few years ago, I created a desktop widget for Yahoo Widgets (formally Konfabulator). I’ve spent the last couple of days turning that into a Wordpress Widget. If you run a College Football BLOG, then this is a perfect addition to your site. I get the data from a variety of different sources, and I house the data on a server that I own and maintain. I have over 12,000 users of the widget – so I thought it might be nice to continue that momentum and allow WordPress bloggers to have some fun.
It works as a plugin/widget, but you must be using a theme that is “widget friendly”.
Here is what it looks like:
Here’s how to get it going:
1. Download fanWidget.zip
2. Install into your plugins/widget directory (mine is wp-content/plugins/widgets – but I made that directory myself)
3. Activate the widget in your plugins administrative console.
4. Go to “presentation/widgets” and drag the “fanWidget” block from the available widgets box to your sidebar of choice above.
5. Click on the properties icon (top right of the fanWidget block) and set your preferences.
Notes
- The widget is styled using an external style sheet. You are welcome to point the widget to your own style sheet, although I think that my version is quite handsome (thanks to Rik Catlow for his design genius)
- There is a small link on the bottom right side of the widget (identified by the “+”). Please support this widget, and do not remove this link. It will bring interested users to this page.
Things to do…
When I have some time, I plan on adding the following to this widget:
1. Ability to choose a different timezone to display on the schedule. Currently the calendar only displays Eastern Time for schedule entries
2. Styling within the widget’s controls – building a dynamic stylesheet upon rendering
3. Links from the opponents names to the team page on Yahoo or ESPN.
4. Shortcuts for team names so that I can display the schedule in a larger font-size without messing up the sidebar
5. and whatever other enhancements you recommend.
Thanks for giving this a try!
Alvin Kreitman
{ 22 } Comments
Nice plugin! However, I’m getting a blank screen for properties in Wordpress, any ideas?
Hi Ryan:
The only things that I can think of is
a. you aren’t using the most current WP
b. you didn’t follow the instructions above…
c. Something is prohibiting the setup scripts to establish a connection to a remote server.
Sorry I’m not more help. Let me know if you are still not having any luck.
Alvin
Great little widget Alvin. I’d make sure to notify newbies with php, that they need to have php5 on their site for this class to work.
How would I go about adding this widget to a page multiple times? I’d like to have several schedules displayed according to the teams that are popular for my site.
Awesome widget. I’m definitely gonna try it out. Thanks. =)
How can I center this widget in my sidebar? It appears centered in IE 7 but it doesn’t center in Firefox. What is the easiest method to center it?
This is a great widget! Is it possible to add NFL teams? or other teams like baseball, hockey etc? That would be great!
Love the idea of this widget, but just can’t get it to work…..Once I activate it, I move over to the widgets area, and all of my other widgets have disappeard and so have the sidebar choices….Is this because it’s a newer version of wordpress?
Anyone know?
thanks
Evan – I can’t recreate the behavior you are seeing – I can only anticipate that something is wrong with your wordpress installation. I’ve upgraded to the newest WP and I uninstalled and reinstalled my widget this morning – and I can’t replicate the problem.
Sorry you are having these issues.
Best, Alvin
Alvin, thanks for the reply. hmmm……I’ll try reinstalling it and see what happens….It’s really weird.
thanks again,
Evan
I love this widget. It works great, but for some reason it didn’t update the last score. What database is it pointing to? Any idea when/if it will put a score up there?
Thanks again and great job.
Jody
Hi Jody. Ooops – I had a server crash the other day, and apparently the code that updated the schedule wasn’t working. All fixed now.
Awesome, thanks…
Is the widget user-configurable by team? That is, can a visitor to a blog choose which schedule is displayed by some menu or other means?
You mean mankind just sprouted like mushrooms? ,
Do you have a college basketball widget?
Hi Jeff – I don’t have a basketball widget. I hoped a few years ago that I would create that too – but I’ve never been able to find the time.
download link is dead,broken.
The link appears to work for me. Please try again and let me know if it’s failing for you. I can email the file to you if you’d like.
Hello – great plugin. I think I will definitely give it a try. Where does the plugin pull the data from? How frequently is that data updated?
Finally, the plugin date shows 2007/09, has there been a recent update for WP2.9+?
Hi Charlie. Thanks! The data is being pulled from my own servers. I pull the data from a few sites; I have data-scraping scripts that run nightly. I haven’t updated the widget in a while, and probably won’t. I may offer a few more teams – but that wouldn’t by itself require any changes to the widget.
Good luck with it.
Alvin Kreitman
All the text on my widget is white and blends in with the white background, is there anything that can be done about this? You can’t tell what team you are looking at. The picture you have shown has black text. Also, the schedule is still from last year and it is really skinny in the sidebar, it should be much wider or adjustable. Can these things be changed, they seem easy to modify. Thanks.
Hi Justin: The schedule will update in a few weeks when I put in the new data-scraping scripts for the upcoming season. As for the style – you should feel free to adjust the styling as you see appropriate for your site. You can copy the css and point the script to your modified version of the css. Good luck. Alvin
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