Blog Changes – Twitter, Akismet, and Flickr integration.

I was bored, so I made some changes to the blog – previously, I had Flickr using my previous theme, but it didn’t look quite right. I also wanted a way to easily post quick notes and links about my exercise progress, so I decided to use Twitter for that, and I wanted it also to show up on the blog.

So…

1. I created a twitter box for Hemingway’s Bottombar. I did this by loading Alex King’s Twitter-tools plugin, and making a small hemingway block for that – here’s the code:

<h2>Twitter</h2>
<ul class="twitter">
< ?php aktt_sidebar_tweets(); ?>
</ul>

Put that in a file in your wp-content/themes/hemingway/blocks/ folder, and then reload the Hemingway Options, and you will be given the opportunity to add it as a block, then drag it wherever you want.

2. I have the number of Akismet blocked spam messages in the footer. The standard counter uses a bunch of div’s and span’s to make a nice HTML box, but I just wanted the number. This function gets you just that number:

function akismet_counter_nohtml() {
  echo number_format(get_option('akismet_spam_count'));
}

Add that to the end of the wp-content/plugins/akismet/akismet.php file, and then put some code in the footer like this:

 <a href="http://akismet.com/">Akismet</a> has removed < ?php akismet_counter_nohtml(); ?> spam messages so far.

3. Flickr integration is built into Hemingway. All you have to do is install the FlickrRSS plugin, and it just works. I’m using 9 square images, with nothing before and after each image, and it makes a nice box.