October 2006

Monthly Archive

Another Wordpress AJAX Widget, Google Video Search

Posted by mccrory on 28 Oct 2006 | Tagged as: widgets

I’m on a roll folks, two Wordpress widgets in two days.

Similar to Google MapSearch, Google VidSearch is a widgetization of the video AJAX code from Mark Lucovsky’s ajaxsearch Typepad and Blogger templates.
I’ve set a few parameters in the widget options to control the player size in the sidebar, and also added 5 video tag options.

See more here

Google MapSearch Widget for Wordpress

Posted by mccrory on 26 Oct 2006 | Tagged as: widgets

Mark Lucovsky’s ajaxsearch blog has a wonderfully clear demonstration of integrating Google Map Search into a Typepad Template. If you can do it for Typepad why not for Wordpress? Why not indeed…

Armed with nothing but overconfident zeal and the Google Map Search Template files from the AjaxSearch blog I’ve managed to create an equivalent Widget for Wordpress.

Be gentle with it though, its my first attempt at a Wordpress Widget.

 

If you want to download the Map Search wiget you can find it here.

How a Digg button is made.

Posted by mccrory on 05 Oct 2006 | Tagged as: photoshop

This really is a no brainer folks…

The kind people at Digg have released a pack of buttons and badges you can download from digg.com/tools/buttons.

The digg-badges.zip file contains a ton of GIF and PNG graphics and one very nice Photoshop PSD file called badges.psd.

If you want to know how a Digg button is made just open up badges.psd in Photoshop.

The badges.psd is basically a sheet of graphics with the buttons divided into folders in the Layer Dialog Box.

Sheet of Digg Graphics

If you right click anywhere on the sheet you can select any of the specific buttons.

Just to show you how simply made these button are, right click and select the Large Button Option.

Look across to layers dialog box. You should see a folder called Large Button selected.

Click on the folder and it should open up 3 more layers inside.

 

Hide the text, and the nice little Digg man layers (click on the little eye) and all you should have left is a Digg button on a white background.

 

Click on the little arrow beside the layer style symbol and you should see the 3 layer styles have been used to create the button.

 

The button brakes down into 3 sections all represented by an individual layer style.

1. The Stroke Style – Used to place a 1px border on the rectangle
2. The Inner Shadow – Places a white edge on the border
3. The Gradient Overlay – The Buttons internal gradient.

So the cool Digg button is a plain white rectangular box, filled with white and 3 layer styles applied.

And thats it…

 

Try playing around with the different style settings and you can come up with some excellent variations.

Now to create your own button from scratch just match the settings from the styles above on a new canvas in a white rectangle.

Here’s 3 buttons made only by changing the color of the gradient style in the layer.

Bingo, you have your own instant Digg style button.

And thats only one of the graphics.

Enjoy…