Since I don’t consider my blog anonymous or ‘seekrit’ I grabbed a text widget and started adding an “About Me” to my sidebar. After trying to get things aligned, formatted, and adding a few links I started thinking a widget might be nice for this. Et voila. This was my first-ever widget, so I appreciate your patience ;’)
Now, with over 8000 downloads I am releasing what I hope to be a more friendly widget. The biggest issues previously were related to path(s), layout and alignment. This left me wanting to re-design the configuration interface, keeping in mind a lot of users know little about HTML/CSS and validity issues, yet allowing the geekier to get into details/code if so desired.
After a lot of hours designing, testing and uttering quite a few curses, my head finally popped out of my sphincter and I decided to use what WordPress uses: TinyMCE. WordPress users are at least somewhat familiar with it, it’s already ‘built-in’ (no extra libraries/scripts) and I soon discovered it was easily configurable. Actually it’s easily configurable AFTER you’ve learned how. Before, it’s a bitch.
So here it is. The New King Hell Deluxe About Me Widget Supreme (ymmv)
!!Note!! This version is not backwards compatible with versions of wordpress older than 3.1 If you are upgrading to version 2.0 from an older version be sure to copy the old about me text out before upgrading, as the new API creates new values for the title and text in the wordpress database.
Feedback
http://samdevol.com/about-me-widget-for-wordpress/
Support Forum
http://www.samdevol.com/wp-content/myforums/viewforum.php?id=3