cool things you can do with Stray Random Quotes

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…)