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Bloodhound Scenius in a Widget

By Dave Smith Tuesday December 9, 2008

(UPDATE)

While helping get a Bloodhound Senius Widget up and running using the Fun With Widgets Plugin we discovered there is a conflict between that plugin and the Thesis theme.

I recently ran across another plugin (My Custom Widget) which I decided to try and I like it much better. It is easier to get your Senius widget code up and running in your sidebar with the My Custom Widget. It isn’t that hard to figure out. (Well maybe) If you want you can check out the detailed post on My Custom Widget for Your Custom Blog.

I have to confess, I often don’t understand much of what Greg Swann is saying. I don’t know what a Scenius is and Praxis is either an exploding moon which was the Klingon Empire’s prime source of dilithium or something I go to the chiropractor to get put back in place.

I’ve read all the posts about Scenius several times and I don’t know what it is yet. I think it is a pretty cool piece of code and when I went to put it in my sidebar (which is widgetized) I found I could put it at the top or at the bottom, but I couldn’t place it in the list of widgets to get it in the sidebar where I wanted it to appear; till today.

If you have a widgetized theme and use those widgets you probably have never even thought about editing the sidebar.php file. Many RE bloggers aren’t comfortable editing those files for fear of breaking their blog and theme. However, most will add a widget to the sidebar using the widget functions under design in the newer versions of Wordpress.

Fun With Theme Widgets

I found a new plugin for building Theme widgets called Fun With Theme Widgets

This is a pretty cool plugin all on it’s own. Activate the plugin create a yourwidgetname.widget.php file and put it in your current theme directory. When you go into Design, Widgets you will see your newly created widget in the list. Drag the widget where you want it to appear and save the changes. That is all there is to it.

Since starting this post I’ve learned more about the process of using Scenius and what it is doing. It is very creative and a good way to syndicate quality local content. Please Note I’m not talking about splogging local content. I”m talking about providing links to local content of interest to the readers on your blog, even if some of that content might be from another local RE blog.

I’ve created two widgets ready to be placed in your theme directory once you unzip them. One for Scenius and one for Phoenix Headlines.

If you have been wanting to try the Scenius code but weren’t sure how to get it into your widgetized theme this process should make it much simpler.

(UPDATE:) You can use the Delicious Widget in ways you can’t use Scenius code. Again, this is a learning process and the more I learn about the Scenius process it is nothing like the Delicious Widget. Like comparing apples to oranges. They are both fruit and there the similarities end. Scenius is just getting rolling and like any tool, used properly it will be of great value, used improperly it has potential for misuse. But then again so does a lot of tech tools we use everyday. I still use email but hate the spam that comes in. Scenius scene is still being painted.

The Delicious Widget

The Delicious Widget does something similar in this sense. I install the widget and tell it what tag to be looking for to display in the sidebar. Anytime I find an article or post on the web that fits that tag I tag it with my special tag and it shows up in my delicious widget on the sidebar.

Not the same process, but very similar results. You can read all about the plugin in an earlier post “Using the delicious plugin“.

However, I have a feeling there is more to the Scenius scene than we have yet scene. Being able to put future revelations and manifestations in widgets should be beneficial to Scenius end users.

Using the del.icio.us plugin

By Dave Smith Saturday May 5, 2007

The sidebar widget is a wonderful thing. It makes it so easy to change the layout of your sidebars and add additional widgets without having to write a single line of code.

I wrote about the Sidebar Widget on single property sites. Included in with the sidebar widget is the del.icio.us plugin.

I use this little plugin on all the blogs I author. It is very handy. But I don’t think many other people use it or even give it a thought.

I was reading a thread over at Real Estate Webmasters on social bookmarking. One of those replying stated they never used del.icio.us.

I use it as a repository for all the sites I want to bookmark and comeback to later. I also use it in conjunction with the plugin.

set up a delicious account
add it to your browser toolbar
activate the del.icio.us plugin
enter a tag for the plugin
enter a title for the plugin

When you tag something in delicious with that tag it will automatically show up in your sidebar as soon as you tag it.

I know that might not make sense so here is an example of how I use it.

I have the del.icio.us plugin set up on the Tucson Real Estate in the News blog to tucson-real-estate-news. If I read an article in the paper about Tucson real estate I go to that article on the paper’s web site and I tag it with the tucson-real-estate-news tag.

The link and title immediately show up on the blog. If the title is longer than I want I can go into my del.icio.us account and edit the title.

The Oro Valley Real Estate blog has it’s own tag of oro-valley-news. You saw that one coming.

I also have it on this blog. It is down at the bottom of the right hand navigation titled “Items of Interest”

It is a handy little plugin. I’m sure many of you can come up with a way to use this plugin on your blog. It is a quick and easy way to share a list of links where you want your readers to go.

As an aside, the paper makes these article free to search for a couple of weeks, but after that you have to pay per article to get them out of the archive, but if you have the link already, it always works. This is another advantage to this little plugin and del.icio.us.