Introducing the Nike Plus Mini WordPress Plugin.

After creating a Nike Plus Mini avatar in the Nike+ website, this plugin will add a widget to your sidebar showing your mini avatar.

There are customizable settings for size and background color.

All it needs is your Nike+ screen name.

Installing:

1.  Download the zip file Nike+ Mini Wordpress Plugin.
2.  Unzip it and upload the folder wp-nikeplusmini to your website’s /wp-content/plugins/ folder.
3.  In your WordPress dashboard, click Plugins and activate WP-NikePlusMini.

4.  Now go to Design->Widgets

5.  Add WP-Nike-Plus-Mini to a sidebar

6.  Click Edit

7.  Edit the Options and click Change. Be sure to add your Nike+ Screen Name.

8.  Save the changes and your done!

Disclaimer:

This is my first WordPress plugin and use of php.  If you try this plugin, let me know what you think in the comments.

I hate tag clouds… They look so unorganized and messy. But I don’t hate them as much anymore. And that’s because of WP-Cumulush. WP-Cumulush is a Wordpress plugin by Roy Tanck that creates a flash based tag cloud.  This one moves in 3D and looks really nice.  I like it because the UI is seamless and instantly knowable.  Just hover your cursor around to make it move.  It really is brilliant.  Try it out on the side —–>

Installing and setting up WP-Cumulush:

1.  Download WP-Cumulush from here.

2.  Unzip the zip file and upload the folder “wp-cumulush” to your “/wp-content/plugins/” folder.

3.  Sign into your blog’s admin and click on Plugins

4.  Activate the Plugin

5.  In your dashboard, go to Design and then Widgets

6.  Add the Widget “wp-cumulush” to a sidebar

7.  Click Edit to get to the Options Menu

8.  Change the options to suit your blog

9.  Don’t forget to save the changes!

Hints:

I found that it was better to have the plugin wider than high, so that the tags would not be cut off.

An easy way to make the tag cloud look seemless is to check “Background transparency” in the options.

In the Settings section of the dashboard you will find the same options for wp-cumulush that are shown above.  Those don’t seem to work.

Prima Theme for Sandbox

I spent last night diving into the design of this site. My mind is not very design oriented. If only I knew what I wanted the site to look like I’d be able to code it up. It takes me a while, but I usually can get a design I’m happy with. Check out some of my website designs: My Nike CSS Test Site My Work’s Site Neeps!

The first thing I did was installed Prima. Prima is a WordPress Theme that uses Sandbox to create a very simple and aesthetically pleasing blog. The plan was to use Prima’s well commented css file as a template to edit. Hopefully by the time I’m done there won’t be any resemblance between KennethBrandon.com and Prima.

My blog view in a wide browser

My Blog view in a thin browser

The second thing was to give Prima a new big header. What’s bigger than Crater Lake? I took this photo of Crater Lake on my last hiking trip across Oregon. Last night I spent most of my time doing some CSS magic so that the header has a somewhat liquid design. (Try resizing the page!) I wanted to reward all visitors who spent some big $ on large screens with a cool picture. The biggest challenge was to get the rounded corners on the header no mater how wide their browser is.

I think my next step will be to work on my plain home page.

Is Sandbox a step back?

WordPress' Default Theme

That may be true, however to do this, Sandbox strips most of WordPress’ formatting.  You go from WordPress’ nice, clean default look, to a horrid, cluttered, completely style-less mess.

I have to start adding some css fast!

This will hopefully become a place for me to share some of my projects with the world…  I have some big ideas for this site, but first I will have to figure out how to use WordPress and set up this blog!