digitalmeandering.com

After I finished configuring my blog, and then my wife’s blog, I decided to see what all this PHP fuss was about. To help ‘learn me gud’ and fill a much needed void, I set out to write my own little WordPress Widget. A few days later, it is a success! I wrote a little widget to go forth and procure the Astronomy Picture of the Day, and display it victoriously on my blog (albiet on a smaller scale). Feel free to look to the lower right of my blog to see today’s picture in all it’s splendor.

At the moment the image is the ‘normal’ sized version of the picture, scaled down by the browser to a fixed width of 150 pixels. Yes, yes, I know, I’m making people download a larger picture since I’m not actually changing the file size, but I couldn’t find a way to resize and serve up a remote image and I didn’t at this point want to write a widget that would write to disk. If anyone can think of a better way to do this, I’m all ears.. well more like all eyes since the communication will more than likely come in the form of email and/or blog comments.

I will be be uploading a version of my APOD Widget later this weekend after I’ve finished some refactoring and code clean up, since this is my first attempt at PHP and all that. Oh, and many thanks to the authors of the Google Search widget, which I used as a template of sorts for ‘widgetizing’ my creation.