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
{ 6 } 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!
{ 1 } Trackback
[...] in both desktop and blog formats for all major football programs across the country on his web site, where the Louisville schedule is prominently displayed. He reports that the widget has been [...]
Post a Comment