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About Me widget for WordPress - v1.0 (TinyMCE)
When I first started a WordPress blog I wanted to add some personal identification to the front page in an effort to promote validity/identity/what-evah. ‘Widgets’ were somewhat new to WP so I thought this was the approach for me. I ended up with a minor struggle using a text widget and got what I wanted.
…my head finally popped out of my sphincter and…
Then masochism got the better of me and in an attempt to self-flagellate I made an About Me widget. My approach was simple; Enter the URL of an image, a blurb about your self/site and a link or two. It worked simply too: On simply about 70% of themes/sites ;’) The problem was that a lot of themes do some pretty screwy stuff and some web hosts are picky about any file/image handling.
So I began a journey that started with meditation… Once I felt loose and unencumbered by the stress of day to day life I asked my Creator: “Are you familiar with WordPress?”
“Are you frikkin’ kidding me?” My neighbor yelled at his kid. So with a sigh I journeyed on…
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.
I asked my Creator: “Are you familiar with WordPress?”
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. A big plus is that now I can blame pretty much everything on TinyMCE, should the need arise.
Now, with over 8000 downloads I am releasing what I hope to be a more compatible About Me widget. Go to the original article here for details and downloading.
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5 Users Commented on " About Me widget for WordPress - v1.0 (TinyMCE) "
Mr. Devol, thanks for your efforts, I think the widget idea is great. But I don’t know why, it doesn’t work with me 
I have the latest version, and my theme is widget-ready, but something strange happened when I try to configure your widget: the window appear, but the only “interactive” parts are the Title, the Fonts, and the Styles. Everything else is like it doesn’t exist, I can’t click them. I really don’t understand why, would you please help me? Thank you
Troubleshooting in the “comments” section really isn’t a good idea. Try here: About Me Widget Support Forum
Sorry Sam, your akismet blocked me from your forum, so i have to post it here.
Cloud, here’s the workaround to your problem.
IN LINE 36 CHANGE dirname(dirname(__FILE__)) TO basename(dirname(__FILE__))
IN LINE 97 CHANGE /wp-content/plugins/AboutMe/aboutme.css TO /wp-content/plugins/”.basename(dirname(__FILE__)).”/aboutme.css
Martin: Sorry about akismet, I’ve un-spammed your forum post, hopefully akismet learned from that ;’)
Here’s a link to Martin’s complete post: Today 11:13:33
Thanks Martin…
The reason when you click links in the about me configuration and they come up page not found, is that the name of the about me folder in the download is now what is coded in the actual script. I had to rename my about my folder in my wp-content/plugins directory to “AboutMe” as opposed to the default name in the download package of “about-me-widget”. Once you do that, re-activate the plugin, etc, you will find that all the links work.
My only gripe is that the alignment options for images do not work, I can’t get my image to center, it shows as centered in the configuration box, but is missing the html centering options and does not display properly on my blog. If you view the html code, if won’t let you ad div tags either to try to center it yoruself.
