The Sexy Blogroll meets the Widget – Update

I am running WordPress 2.3.1 on my blog. And for some reason the original AdRotator I installed and blogged about here was making my blog load all wrong. So I have deactivated it for now. It is easy to use, please don’t stay away from it because of this post. It may work very well for you. It may just not play nice with something else I have running. I have not had time to figure that out yet – I have got costumes to put on children, faces to paint, and candy to steal from my children eat later. For now I am playing with AdRotator from Angsuman. This might work for some of you other bloggers that don’t use WordPress as he states:

Displays an advertisement (which is randomly selected from a group of advertisements specified in a text file) at your chosen location. Tested on WordPress 1.5 & 2.x. Should work with earlier and later versions (future and past proofed). It can also be used with other CMS systems or anywhere where PHP is supported.

Disclaimer: I do not know anything about other platforms. I do not take responsibility for what you do with this plugin or how you use it. If it does not work with your blog or causes problems, I am not responsible. Read his manual.

This plugin does not have multiple widget support like the first one I told you about, but it does work in the Text widgets and can be run multiple times. this is the most flexible of all of the plugin/widgets I have found, just not the most user friendly. Angusman’s direction are not entirely clear. So I will tell you what I did in a step by step fashion. Ready? Here we go:

1. Downloaded the plugin.
2. Unpacked the plugin.
3. Uploaded the plugin.
4. Activated the plugin.
5. Opened a text editor (any kind should do).
6. Created a new .txt file, naming it whatever you would like to call it. (I named mine blogroll.txt.)
7. Entered one line code for each blogroll entry. Here are the first three lines of my file:

8. Saved the edited .txt file.
9. Uploaded the .txt file to the wp-content folder.
10. Put this line of code in a text widget:

Note: this code rotates via the pageloads.

Now, the way this works is that for as many .txt files I type and as many text widgets as I have available, I can use this code. If I have three text widgets available then I can put this code with a different .txt file in each one, giving me three distinct blogrolls (all named something different, of course); for example: blogroll.txt or reciprocalblogroll.txt or whoyagonnacallghostbusters.txt. But wait! It gets even better. If you do NOT use widgets or don’t want to use widgets or you don’t have a plugin to make php work in your post and pages (I use Exec-php) then you can put this code directly into your sidebar.php, or index.php, or footer.php. Anywhere php can go this can go! WOW! Awesome.

If you have a self-hosted wordpress blog and you find this too daunting and would like help with it please ask, you might find yourself happy you did.