In the previous Movable Type version of this blog, I had a rotating subheader just under the blog title with various sig-line-like nuggets of wisdom (“To know recursion you must know recursion,” etc.). When I got over into the WordPress world, though, I didn’t see anything that could do that.
What I did find, though, was a plugin called XmasB Quotes (the plugin has nothing to do with Christmas — that’s just the author’s handle). That let me put all those little bon mots into a database and then have them randomly pop up in the blog’s sidebar, where they’ve been under the heading “Witty Repartee.”
Fast forward a few months now, and I know a lot more about WP and PHP than I used to. So I decided to actually poke into the XmasB Quotes documentation — and, sure as shooting, discovered I could use the code …
<?php if(function_exists('xmasb_print_random_quote')) : xmasb_print_random_quote(); endif; ?>
… pretty much anywhere I wanted. And since the Thesis theme lets me easily insert stuff into the blog in odd spots without editing the actual underlying template files, as well as turn on/off the WP tagline, and … voilà.
So kudos to XmasB for giving me what I was looking for, even when I didn’t know how to make use of it. Not that anyone but a minority of readers who actually come here to comment will ever see it (since I assume most folks get here through an RSS reader). But I’ll see it, and it will make me smile.
Half the crap I do on my own blog I do for myself and then hope others find it useful or interesting.
That’s why I actually blog about it: both for my own feeble memory (“Now, how did I do that again?”) and in case someone else finds it of use.
Glad to have the quote back at the top of the page. I often missed it when I had to scroll down…
Or…you could use a random tagline plugin… 😉 I use both that and a random quotes plugin.
Quite a few ways to do this on wordpress.
Oh, you mean like this? http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/random-tagline/
Yeah, that would work, too, I suppose … 😉
Sometimes i used to refresh your site just to get a new quote. There are a few I don’t get, which I assume are quotes (probably from a cartoon I never watched). I’m glad to see they have their old spot abck.
Me, too. Well, about the old spot. I get all the quotes that come up. 🙂