I have a blogging client who has a love-hate relationship with computing. This client publishes daily and has become quite adept at the mechanics of doing so, successfully building traffic and a solid following. But when it comes to handling the blog’s administrative tasks, my client balks, refusing to look at any of the admin level menus. “I don’t like being a person who knows just enough to be dangerous,” my client has said.

The latest request from this client was to list the blog’s most popular posts in the sidedbar. It’s a WordPress site and there are many plugins available that will provide a widget for this task. Most are based on comment count as this is the metric that WordPress stores with each post record in its database. Some of the more sophisticated plugins make API calls to other services, such as Twitter and Google, to gather ranking data.

But nothing worked quite right for this client who had become a proficient Google Analytics user as well as a ardent Twitter user. I couldn’t find a popular posts plugin that would reliably match my client’s own subjective sense of popularity. I finally sent an email saying: “You want your readers to see your best stuff, in that respect, the numbers can provide guidance but your own judgement is the best metric.” I promised to figure something out that would allow the selection and ranking of posts although I didn’t have a clue how.

One of the joys of computer programming comes from those moments when you recognize that the particular little problem you’re working on is just a special case of a larger, more interesting and easier to solve problem. In this case, the larger problem was how to enable a WordPress author to publish formatted content to a sidebar widget. If I could solve that problem then my client could simply edit a page containing an ordered list of titles linked to the most popular posts. These could easily be copied from other pages in the WordPress dashboard. The client wouldn’t  need any admin level privileges. All I had to do was setup a text widget with code that pulled in the content of a designated page — A sidebar page.

How to build a WordPress sidebar page widget

Rather than write a dedicated sidebar widget, which is kind of complicated even though the WordPress codex has several examples to copy and paste from, I decided to write a WordPress shortcode which could be used in a sidebar text widget. This shortcode could also be used in other posts or pages on the site — going again for the more general and easier solution.

To start with, I created a new static page with the title, “Popular Posts”. Before you do this and publish the new page, check to see if it will automattically appear in your navigation menus. If you’re using the Menu Manager (included in WordPress 3.0+,) you’re probably okay since there’s a setting for this that’s off by default. If your theme does not use the Menu Manager, you might want to make the new page a child of some other page to exclude it from your navigation.

Next, we have to write a function that will output the contents of a page. This is easy. WordPress provides a built-in function just for that purpose called, get_page( ). We are going to use a variant of that function, get_page_by_title( ), and pass the title of the page (instead of the ID) as a shortcode parameter. Here’s the code for the function:

function my_show_page( $atts, $content = null ) {
    extract(shortcode_atts(array( 'title'=>'' ), $atts));

    if ($title != '') {
        $page_data = get_page_by_title( $title );
        return $page_data->post_content;
    }
    else {
        return '';
    }
}

The first two lines are the standard setup for a shortcode. The parameter, $atts, will contain the shortcode’s parameters. In our case this is the page’s title which is then extracted by the second line of the code. If no title is passed, it’s given an empty string value. Setting the variable $content to null allows us to place the simple shortcode:

[showpage title="Popular Posts"]

wherever we want to display the content of the page “Popular Posts” .

The body of the function is a simple if statement that makes sure a title is provided, then goes and gets the content of that page and returns it. Note that the content is returned unfiltered. That is, it’s unaffected by any plugins (e.g: ShareThis) or other code that modifies content.

The function code goes into your theme’s function file,  functions.php. Make sure you backup this file before you make any changes!! The function code can go anywhere in the file (except, of course, inside of another function) provided that it’s inside a set of php tags.

The next step is to register the shortcode so that it’s available for use. This is just a short command that also goes in the theme’s function file:

add_shortcode('showpage', 'my_show_page');

It can go either before or after the function. I usually place it after the function along with comments to guide any future programmers who may work on my clients’ sites.

Next, we have to enable shortcodes in text widgets. This is not enabled by default in WordPress because of security concerns. Sidebar text widgets are places where people often embed code from outside sources. The concern is that such embeded code might contain a shortcode that could conflict with something else on your blog or otherwise do nasty stuff. This is usually not a problem for smaller, personal blogs, however, I’ll emphasize again the importance of backing up your theme’s functions file before making any changes. Here’s the command to enable shortcodes in text widgets:

add_filter('widget_text', 'do_shortcode');

Add the above to your functions file, save it and test the blog in a separate browser window to be sure it’s still working. Errors in a theme’s functions file will usually crash the public portion of a WordPress blog, but will leave the admin dashboard in working order.

Lastly, add a text widget with the shortcode to your sidebar. Here’s a screenshot from my client’s site illustrating this.

For your convenience, here’s the entire block of commented code that I added to my client’s function file:

/**
* Create a shortcode to display a page's content
*/
//
// [showpage title="page_title"]
//
function my_show_page( $atts, $content = null ) {
    extract(shortcode_atts(array( 'title'=>'' ), $atts));
    if ($title != '') {
        $page_data = get_page_by_title( $title );
        return $page_data->post_content;
    }
    else {
        return '';
    }
}
// register the shortcode
add_shortcode('showpage', 'my_show_page');
//
// Enable the use of shortcodes in text widgets.
add_filter('widget_text', 'do_shortcode');

Now that we see how easy it is to get formatted content into a sidebar widget, perhaps you have some ideas on what can be done with custom shortcodes in sidebar widgets. If so, please share them by leaving a comment below. Thanks.

This site was a blast to work on. I had done a couple of other small repair and rescue jobs for Tom. He is wonderful client; tech-savvy and patient, he pushed for solutions that stretched my skill set and forced me to learn new techniques. Some of the interesting features of onPhilanthropy.com include: customized widget headings, a revamped advertising manager, a Twitter slurp and feeds from companion sites such as, DotOrgJobs.com.

If you are in the dot-org space, please visit onPhilanthropy and check out how good technology can advance good causes. And, of course, feedback is always welcomed.

In the 1980s, when I worked at the CBS News Election and Survey Unit, there was an A.P. ticker near my desk. At the time, the A.P. had the contract to collect election results from their county reporting points, summarize those results and provide them by teletype to members and subscribers. Most of the time, however, it carried the feed of breaking news and followup stories. Postings were not signed, they just had an originating station but, after watching for a while, the personalities of different stations around the World emerged. Mistakes were common and pranks were occasionally pulled. In today’s parlance, this was a very successful social media network with many of the characteristics found in today’s Internet mix of chatting, tweeting and blogging. It just wasn’t free and it wasn’t open. It was built on expensive phone lines leased from Ma Bell and you had to be an accredited member to post stories.

The A.P. has a great heritage that goes back many decades before my encounter at CBS. I have a novel that I bought at The Strand Bookstore on my first visit there upon moving to NYC after collage:  Informed Sources (Day East Received) by Willard S. Bain. The novel is a visual work in teletype-ese, printed in an ALL-CAPS typewriter font. Written in 1967, it was given away for free in mimeograph format by The Communication Company, an underground press, before being published by Doubleday and Company in this softcover edition that I’ll have to stop reading soon if I want to finish this post.

Informed Sources tells the story of a terrorist plot coinciding with the reported death of a pop culture idol from the perspective of the station staffers at Informed Sources (IS), an A.P. like network:

INFORMED SOURCES BULLETIN
    BERKELEY, NOW (IS) -- A PLAN TO BLOW UP GOLDEN
GATE BRIDGE IN HONOR OF ROBIN THE COCK, WHOSE
ALLEGED LIFE REPORTEDLY HAS ENDED IN RUMORED
DEATH, WAS ABANDONED TODAY.
                                          VC807PPS

Except that this is 1967 and everyone is more or less stoned. Yet, here too, you can hear voices like those of today’s Internet. Take this quote from the beginning:

BOSTON, NOW (IS) -- WHAT'S HAPPENING?
     IN SCORES OF SCATTERED BASEMENT BASES ACROSS
THE LAND THE QUESTION GATHERED ITSELF AND THEN
HOVERED IN THE ANSWERING ECHO.
     CYNICS SNEERED IT WAS ALL A BIG PIPE DREAM, BUT
ONE OVEREXTENDED PIONEER OF THE NEW LEISURE SAID
"THAT'S WAY BESIDE THE POINT."

The more thing change… Right? The novel remains an unknown classic of the underground literary world at that time when the beat poets were experimenting with LSD and cultural revolution. It’s not on-line, as far as I know. There are only four used copies of the softbound edition for sale on Amazon and only one of the mimeograph copies.

WHIMSY SEIZES SYNAPSE TRAPEZES

Sorry, but I don’t wish the A.P. well in their headline selling business. Not if it means a full court press against fair-use under copyright that will saddle the Internet with last century’s digital rights concepts. There is a big difference between atoms and bits and the bits of information that seach engines gather and maintain about other online content (links) is not that content — it is the conversation about that content. The A.P. did social media right for so many years but now they don’t seem to get it at all. Paid headlines, like paid speech must eventually lose market share to free variety.

Like my own site, KateNasser.com has a static home page. A custom menu provides easy navigation to other pages and sub-pages. The sidebar prominently features her contact information followed by an embedded video clip from one of her speaking engagements. Below that, is a list of her most recent posts. At the bottom of the page is a section showing post excerpts in a special category: “Hot Topics and New Bits.”

What was most fun was teaching Kate how to use YouTube to organize her video playlists and embed them in posts for her site. I also taught her how to use social media services to drive traffic to her site. She’s become an avid twitterer. You can follow her tweets at @KateNasser .

Please take a look at KateNasser.com and let us know if we did as good a job as we think we did.

— Larry

Google Chrome is a minimalist’s browser. It doesn’t offer a multitude of features, but it’s very fast and solid as a rock. It relies heavily on tabs when visiting different sites and each tab runs in its own process. This keeps the browser from crashing from a page error or some misbehaved plug-in, and prevents pages in the background from slowing down the foreground window. I like Chrome’s history function. When you open a new tab or window it displays thumbnails and links to your most recently vistited pages.

Chrome offers a single address bar for both URLs and keywords. Google is the default search engine, but it can be switched to others—Wikipedia, Aol, Yahoo, etc. The address bar has a fast auto-suggest function. For flying around the Web from site to site, Chrome is a jet fighter. However, if you mostly stay put on a collection of actively fed “home” pages, Flock may be the browser for you. It’s a mega-cruise ship.

Flock is Firefox on social media steroids. Flock takes a framed approach to visiting the Social Media Web, grabing feeds from places, such as: Facebook, Twitter and MySpace into sidebars and YouTube selections into a headband. Flock works best opened full-screen on a big, wide, LCD display. Beware! The shear number and variety of tool bars, control tabs, bookmarks, menus and search boxes can overwhelm.

Flock, by default, remembers the sites you had loaded when you last quit and reopens them. It also opens a generated page, “My World” that captures all your various feeds, messages and pings.  I like the way Flock integrates with Gmail, and find it useful as an “active desktop” – a one-stop site that I scan every so often to keep in the mix as I’m doing other work. Flock pops-up a standard blog editor when I want to post something and just about anything can be shared with a drag-n-drop action.

The online support documentation provided by the these two new browsers also provide a facinating contrast. Google wrote a Chrome comic book that teaches you how to use Chrome with a technical depth that’s actually readable. Flock has uploaded a series of youTube videos showing Flock’s Features in action. Check it out, you’ll get a better idea of what Flock is like and I won’t have to insert a screenshot here.

Google Chome is only available now for Windows. When it becomes available for the Mac, I’ll probably be using both Flock and Chrome more often than Firefox and Safari.

— Larry