Cool Aid: Wordsy Badges on your site
Well, it's been a while in the making but they're finally here: Wordsy badges you can put on your site. If you're a blogger and you'd like more exposure for your rantings, there are now a few ways to get your site to work with Wordsy.com using our new badges. We hope you think them as beautiful and functional as we do. Feedback in the comments! Let me give you a quick rundown of the what 'n how of our all singing all dancing Wordsy badges.
- 1. First the easiest way.This is the one you'll probably use if you on a blogging service like Wordpress.com / LiveJournal.com / Blogger.com et cetera. When you go to an individual story page such as This One, you'll see a link called 'Show this story on your own site'. When you click that you'll be able to select some code. You can incorporate that into the story on your blog, and it'll interactively show the number of votes you've received thusly:
- 2. Secondly, it's also possible to put a button on your site before it's been submitted. It will allow your visitors to submit stories they like to wordsy. That badge looks like the one on this page. We recommend adding this to your template so you don't have to manually add the link for each story. One thing to remember about this badge is that it won't work when you're trying to submit from the homepage. It doesn't intrinsically know the url of your story, unless you've done some template magic.
Everything's in 'beta', obviously, but it certainly seems stable enough. If you're having trouble however, please let us know either via email or in the comments below. We'll get back to you ASAP.
Have fun and let's see some Wordsy badges out there!
-- Wordsy Team
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I'll try this out on Sunday. I may even go to some effort to build a wordpress plugin for it.
Rat's Reading - http://reading.kingrat.biz/
great!
Oh, one note on method #1. It won't work on Livejournal or Wordpress.com. It might possibly work with blogger, but I am not as familiar with them. Livejournal and Wordpress.com strip out all Javascript. I did a quick embed of the badge JS on my recent story. Give it a couple of hours and then go look at the syndicated version on Livejournal.
http://syndicated.livejournal.com/ratreading/68422.html
In the source, you'll see the div element with the float:left style that I used to hold the badge. But the badge Javascript won't show up at all. And they do that with all Javascript that's put into entries.
This is a case where if you guys have the know-how, a Flash-based badge might have some advantages. With Livejournal at least, it's possible to embed Flash, though it's done in an inline frame hosted from another URL and doesn't have access to the mail URL. But if you had an embedded param value for the story-id, that would work.
Rat's Reading - http://reading.kingrat.biz/
Darn it as far as livejournal and wordpress.com is concerned! We'll be able to add an image based one soon...flash might be a bit longer.
Should work on blogger though.
strike "mail URL" and replace with "original URL."
Rat's Reading - http://reading.kingrat.biz/
I've got option #2 up and running on my site now. Thanks for hacking together a plugin for me.
Rat's Reading - http://reading.kingrat.biz/
Thanks for supporting Wordsy! You run a great blog so we're proud to be on it!
The WP plugin could deserve some customization options though, it's very bare bones as it is.
Yah, I'm gonna work on that. I need to teach myself how Wordpress works better. Things I think I'll add:
* per-post badge suppression so that housekeeping posts don't have to get it
* options for placement of the badge
* once you guys have an image version of the badge, put the image version into the feed
Rat's Reading - http://reading.kingrat.biz/
Well I'd *love* to do some work on the WP plugin making an official Wordsy version with several options including several of those you mention. But it's Hans who pays for it so it's up to him to decide whether he wants to sponsor it... *wink wink* :)
In the unlikelihood WP plugins fall outside the definition of "derivative work" (referring to the "viral" nature of the GPL), we'd love if you GPL'd any plugin you make. With your background in software engineering, writing a WP plugin should be a piece of cake. The code Hans sent you took me merely 15 mins to make incl reading the documentation ... I was surprised at how simple it was.
Whatever you can do to help spread the word about Wordsy, we're most grateful!
I've installed it on my blog, and it seems to work great. The button is a bit large, but I can deal with that for now. I'm not sure yet if the voting works, if I try to click and vote for an article I get a blank page, but that may be because it's my own story. ;-P
hi terry, I just voted for an article on your site. It worked for me, but let us know if you keep having problems.
is there just a banner, or badge that I can put on my site promoting Wordsy?
Hi Lucien,
Of course, I'll get you a clean version of our logo ASAP. I'll email you for info about a specific size you may need.
Hans