Aside of the regular stuff, such as displaying quotes on your blog with as many widgets as you want, template tags and shortcodes, you can do some less obvious things with Stray Random Quotes. Here are few examples:
Random taglines
- 1) create a series of quotes to be used as taglines
- 2) make sure you have enabled shortcodes for bloginfo
- 3) go to the general settings of your blog, and write
[stray-random categories=tagline noajax=true disableaspect=true]in your tagline setting, save the settings (note: disableaspect will skip the aspect settings as set in the “how the quotes look” section of the settings page; noajax will disable the AJAX reloading of the quotes. Both settings I highly recommend)
- 4) now your blog has random taglines.
A post category with a random name
- 1) create a series of quotes that will go as names for a category
- 2) make sure you have enabled shortcodes for categories
- 3) when creating a post, add a new category and name it
[stray-random categories=category-names noajax=true disableaspect=true]
- 4) and so you have a category that, staying the same, randomly changes name nonetheless.
Random words in your template
For example, we might want to use a series of random phrases to invite the user to comment posts. This is just by way of illustration: what follows can be applied to virtually any area of your template where words and phrases are used.
- 1) create a “leave-a-comment” series of quotes
- 2) Open “single.php” in your theme folder. For this example I consider the Default theme of WordPress 2.7. Find the line that says
You can <a href="#respond">leave a response</a>- 3) replace it with
<?php stray_random_quote('leave-a-comment',false,'','',true); ?>(For the meaning of these variables, see the Help page on the plugin menu)- 4) a random message now invite readers to comment your posts.
A smart blogroll
This is valid for version 1.8.8+ only.
- 1) Make sure that the option “add a link to the web page as source for the quote” for the bookmarklet in the tools page is checked.
- 2) As you browse the internet, use the “quote this” bookmarklet to capture snippets from websites and blogs you want to link.
- 3) add them to a given category, “blogroll” for example.
- 4) Add a widget to your sidebar set to display a given number of quotes from the “blogroll” category
- 5) Now you have a blogroll with excerpts on your sidebar, that you can randomize, and that you can browse.
(more to come…)
March 7, 2009 at 10:51 pm |
Apologies, I’m a WP beginner. I’m sure these are ridiculously simple questions, but can’t figure the answer out myself so hope you’ll help.
1. I am inserting reviews of our book. Another generator I used enabled you to set the amount of time a quote was up. Does yours do this? If so, where can I find the place to set it.
2. And this is REALLY a dumb question. Assuming there is no set time for a quote to stay up. Are the quotes rotating on the page or when someone new comes to the site, or when?
Thanks very much for your help.
March 8, 2009 at 10:57 am |
@Lynn: There is no time function… The quotes are refreshed every time the page is refreshed or when is first opened.
The user can browse through the quotes without reloading the page if you leave the AJAX on. I gave a look to your blog and in fact I could change quote by clicking on it.
*Update: since version 1.8.8 a timed rotation feature is included in Stray Random Quotes
April 15, 2009 at 7:19 am |
this is really helpful, thanks.
just downloaded and activeated.
July 9, 2009 at 1:32 pm |
is it possible to get the quotes stored as an RSS feed?
July 16, 2009 at 7:27 pm |
I can’t seem to get the random tagline feature to work. It just shows the “[stray-random categories=tagline noajax=true disableaspect=true]” where my tagline should be.
I can’t make any sense of it. I’ve tried it on IE and Chrome.
July 17, 2009 at 6:47 pm |
I’ve figured it out. It had to do with the Thesis theme. The shortcode was being called from inside a hook, which apparently doesn’t work. I had to call the function directly. Took me a bit to figure out which parameters I needed to get it just right, but it’s working now.
I think I might write a custom function in the Thesis custom function file just to make calling it easier.
August 4, 2009 at 11:54 am |
Hi ico,
I’m probably stupid but I can’t find how to display different settings between the sidebar widget and the complete page on my blog.
I’d like to keep the coded settings for the sidebar and to code with other html or css tags for the post page.
I’ve added this :
stray-all orderby=”Author” sort=”ASC” rows=10 fullpage=true,
and tryed to play with noajax and disableaspect with no result…
I’d like for instance to custom the bullet points, to align-right the quote and left sources and authors, to place more ’s tag…?
This is the link for information : http://thiefer.fr/quelques-pensees-finement-pensees/
Many thanks for your help,
TF
September 22, 2009 at 9:49 am |
RSS feeds would be a great idea. My client wants a daily quote to be sent by email to users. If there was a feed then I could enable a subscription to it.
September 29, 2009 at 10:19 am |
Thanks for this plugin. It is the only one I have found with a rotating option.
I just figured out how to post the testimonials on a dedicated page. Pretty simple actually.
[stray-random all-quotes]
But how can I list all of them? not just one?
September 29, 2009 at 10:58 am |
Sorry, I just found it on the Help page.
[stray-all all-quotes] will display all quotes.
Got a question on the pagination. Which file of the plugin has the code where I can edit/add stuff for easier styling?
October 2, 2009 at 8:45 pm |
Hi,
Love the plugin – Great work and thanks for sharing!
Some of my quotes are really long. I was wondering if it’s possible to have only part of the quote displayed and then have a ‘More’ button to view the entire quote?
Thanks again!
October 22, 2009 at 4:05 pm |
Would you provide a setting that can change the title of the Quote section from “Random Quote” to a user choice?
November 1, 2009 at 7:26 pm |
i have just installed the exciting plugin, which is going to keep me busy for hours. so thanks
but hey… the images on your site here are a no-show. maybe temp, but still i thought i should buzz you
November 16, 2009 at 2:21 pm |
I love your plugin! So easy to set up, I added 20 quotes from our testimonial page in a matter of minutes.
Three things I’d like to see:
1) A fade out / fade in effect to mask the loading time (the changes are rather abrupt right now). I know that with Javascript things like this can be done – is there a way to integrate this?
2) A way to fix the height of the widget area. Right now, with the quotes being different lengths, it makes the other items below the quotes move up and down as each quote changes. Perhaps there is a way to do this with a DIV tag – I’ll play around and see. But it would be great if this was a built-in option.
3) Add HTML color codes along with the Bold, Italic and Link codes – to allow easy coloring of parts of the text. This can be done now by adding manual bits of code, but a built-in option would be very cool.
November 16, 2009 at 10:13 pm |
How do you enable short codes in your bloginfo? I am using WordPress 2.8.6 and can’t see any options. Is there a file I need to update?
I posted this on another thread, but this is where it makes more sense. Sorry for the double comment post!
November 16, 2009 at 10:24 pm |
Oh. ok. You meant Tools under Stray Quotes.
Sorry. I’m stupid, and have now posted 3 times on your blog for apparently no reason.
It’s only because I love this plug-in!
December 21, 2009 at 8:21 am |
Excellent script, thank you.
I’d like to have an RSS or export script of some sort, too, so I can display quotes on my other sites without having to execute the plug-in on them too.
I thought I was being clever by entering the short code into a comment on one of the pages in the site it’s implemented on, so I could use the comments feed in an RSS widget on my other sites. The quotes rotate properly in the comment box on the installation site, but the reader on my other site displays the short code, rather than the quote. Bumming…
July 14, 2009 at 10:06 pm |
It is not possible… but a good idea. I’ll look into it, and if it’s not too complex to do, I could make it a new feature.
July 16, 2009 at 10:12 pm |
@J. Lynne: I suppose you have enabled the shortcodes on “bloginfo”, on the tools page?