Ok so the only person that I know of to be “long awaiting” this plugin is myself. I’ve had it on the drawing board for over a year now.

I worked on a commercial project a few years back that built and utilized a database of events throughout history to display “Today in History” results. That venture slowly went belly-up so here I was with this database of Tens of Thousands of events that had been so painstakingly added to this database, so what could I do with them.

Well today is the answer and fulfillment of that question. I give you the Today In History Widget so that you can display interesting facts and figures for your readers. So I hope you will enjoy this plugin, and if you do feel free to send us your questions or comments, and if it is working well for you I hope you would consider donating to help further the development.

I know, I know the last three or four posts have been about updates to our Social Crowd wordpress plugin… Don’t worry there will be more of them as we have been pretty active in it’s development over the last several days/weeks.

This release fixes a minor bug in the plugin’s admin UI as well as providing some additional functionality to address some confusion. The confusion being caused because the Profile ID fields for each social network were built to receive the actual Profile ID or Unique Identifier for the given social network. The example under each field showed an example url from each social network that had the ID you should enter bolded. But after receiving some feedback from users, it became apparent that some if not many users were inserting the whole URL rather than just the ID. So some code was added to accept either the ID or the full URL.

I hope this makes the plugin easier to use.

On the heels of a major Social Crowd plugin update last week we have a new release to increase the capabilities of this remarkable little plugin.

One of the most frequently requested networks for addition to Social Crowd, was the Linked In Business Social Network. And after reviewing copious amounts of documentation we found an easy way to add support for that network.

So that’s about it folks, you can now show off the number of Connections that you have made with the Linked In Network right on your WordPress homepage or sidebar. But we should note that the nature of this addition (like the Google+ integration) is in a BETA state, and should perform for you, but if you have any problems please feel free to Contact Us and let us know so we can address the issue.

On the heels of the maintanance release of our Browser Blocker Plugin, we announce the major and long awaited update to our Social Crowd plugin.

After many months and numerous requests from Social Crowd users, we have worked hard to make this amazing plugin even easier to use for everyone out there.

When we initially designed this plugin it was aimed at theme designers or advanced developers that would integrate the social crowd stats into their designs, so it came with no default styling or graphics. But after several emails from clients it was apparent that there were many users that wanted to use the stats, but not have to worry about learning how to integrate the php functions with their theme/site.

Additionally there have been many requests for additional social networks, and although we have not thus far been able to fulfill all of the requested social network integrations, this release is our first effort at expanding the initial set of social networks available with this plugin.

Social Crowd 0.5 enter stage right.

New Features:

Google+ Stats (Beta Support) – This will allow you to display the number of people that you have in your circles, as well as the number of people that have you in their circles. It is beta support because Google doesn’t officially provide a way to capture this data, so if they decide to change the main page layout it could break this feature.

Social Crowd Stats Widget – Lots of questions have come in asking why the stats and icons didn’t show up once the plugin was installed. Well as noted above the plugin was initially for theme developers that could utilize the plugins php functions directly. But it became increasingly evident that this was not the core group that wanted to use this plugin.

So with this release there are included two separate plugins, a basic and an advanced plugin, the basic plugin is straight forward, with very few options to configure. The advanced plugin gives the user a much deeper level of control over the content of the widget.

Short Code Support – Yes a shortcode has been created that will allow the user to display the stats they want anywhere on any post or page that they create inside wordpress. Anywhere that you can use a Short Code you can use this code to simplify your life.

Well there you have it, the major changes to the Social Crowd Plugin. Get it today to start growing your Social Crowd.

Additionally some comments and FAQ’s were added to the Readme file that should help with the usage of the Browser Blocker Plugin.

Have fun, and enjoy blocking browsers.

Download Browser Blocker

Get Additional Info

The default forms of information that GeekTool supports are Files, Images, and Shell Commands. This allows you to display the realtime information from any file on your Mac, like Log Files or maybe a ToDo list and similar files. With the Image Plugin you can display any image from your computer or from a URL out on the internet. And with the Shell command, you guessed it, you can display any information that you can Script, AUK and/or GREP from your command line.

Each of these text information sources can be modified to be any size and use any font, style or colors that you would like, Below is a screenshot of how a couple of users use of the text and images to create an amazing way to display information on your screen.

Along with the default content display options, there are many additional “geeklets” or Geektool Plugins to expand and enhance your desktop viewing pleasure.

And best of all this little tool is Open Source, so dive in, Download Geektool, and get started Geeking out your desktop.

Geektool Homepage

Download Geektool Or pick it up on the Mac App Store

Geeklets 

Stay tuned as we prepare to launch version 0.3, with access to more statistics and an easy to use short code for quick posting and stat access.

Here is a sampling of some of the best (and more) quicklook plugins that I came across in my adventures in digital preview land.

1: Brushview

My last post was about this amazing extension, if you are frequently looking for/at Photoshop brush files, this extension lets you get a good preview of the file before you actually load it up in photoshop to use it. An Invlauable tool.

Homepage | Download

2: QLStephen

With a strange name comes our second extension. If you are a developer or unix administrator that deals with lots of text files that don’t have a file extension, then this one’s for you. This extension allows you to preview the contents of those extensionless “README” files among others, very handy to have around.

Homepage | Download

3: Zip Plugin

Have you ever run across a zip file with a very descriptive name like… “Archive.zip”? And when you run across a file like that it’s a pain to unzip the file just to find out what the contents are. Well no more, the Zip file extension let’s you preview the contents of the zip file before you actually extract the files.

Homepage | Download

4: Folder List

When you are using quicklook and select a folder, by default it displays the folder icon with some basic details about the folder. But what you really want to know is what is inside the folder. This plugin accomplishes just that.

Homepage | Download

5: Quicklook for Markdown

Markdown is becoming increasingly popular for documentation that comes with open source packages. But the question is always “How can I view this effectively?” Quicklook for Markdown solves this problem, making it easy to preview and understand the contents of any markdown syntax files.

Homepage | Download

6: Color XML

XML files are great, and they are being used …. Everywhere now a days. So whatcha need is a way to preview the files and view them with proper syntax indentation and highlighting. The Color XML plugin takes care of that for you.

Homepage | Download

7: QuickCHM

Have you ever wanted to quickly peruse through a chm file without loading up your favorite full blown chm viewer? QuickCHM let’s you do just that, getting fast acces to documentation and books with the click of a spacebar.

Homepage | Download

8: Web Archive Plugin

Whenever you save out a webpage from Safari, you get a nice little webarchive file. And they can be annoying, since they are an archive of images and text rather than just the source code for the webpage. Once again Quicklook comes to the rescue with the Web Archive preview plugin.

Homepage | Download

9: Suspicious Package

Protect yourself against any potential malicious attacks with Suspicious Package. This plugin provides detailed information about any install package that may or may not pose a threat to your system.

Homepage | Download

10: And Finally…. Your Extension

Quicklook plugins appear to be quick and easy to develop, so grab some documentation, combine your skills with a fantastic idea, and go to town creating that idea. Here are some Resources to get you started.

Apples Quicklook Programming Guide

Add File Extensions to Quicklook

Apple Quicklook Dev Mailing List

CocoaDev – Quicklook Wiki

One of those resources (in my case at least) is a significant number of Photoshop Brushes to add accents and textures to my designs. And a bit thank you to the many individuals that have created them and provided them for download.

My biggest frustration with Photoshop Brushes was the fact that if I didn’t keep them loaded up in Photoshop, then it became virtually impossible to find the ones that I wanted to use for a specific project. Sure I could hunt through all the files that had the right name associated with them, but in the end it was a pain, opening each one in photoshop to see what one I wanted to use. That is it Was a Pain until TODAY!!!

I had the fortune of finding a nice little freeware extension to Apples built-in QuickLook capability called BrushViewQL. This little extension has made my day, allowing me to not only preview the contents of the .abr files in finder, but also blow up the preview images with QuickLook. It is a great little extension, with some great potential. So go get it and save yourself some effort!

BrushViewQL Website

Original Post that I read about BrushViewQL

Let me take a moment to introduce you to a sweet new FREE app the I just recently found. Meteo (short for Meteorologist) came to my rescue after a bout with the memory hogging Dashboard Weather widgets. It just seemed like they would never give up, always seeking for a new way to take up my ram at all hazard. After complaining about how much memory Dashboard was using I found some references online to the weather widgets being the biggest culprits, so I set off on a mission to find a solution to my problem. Turns out my solution was Meteo. Not only does Meteo have some amazing features and low memory usage but the level of detail that it can provide you is second to none. As it sits in the menu bar showing you the current conditions it remains crouched and ready to spring at a moments notice to show you a detailed 5 day forecast, the detailed current conditions or even the current radar map for your local area. Not only can you track the weather for your local city but can add many more locations to monitor around the globe.

So I found it, not only did it use significantly less memory (38mb after 2 days of usage vs. 240mb from my Dashboard Widget) but it had a significant number of additional features that I didn’t have before I started my quest. All in all I have to say that this quest was one hundred percent Successful!

Meteo Homepage