There’s always something to howl about.

Announcing the Odysseus Medal Long List of nominees widget

I’m usually not awake when I post at this hour, but I am today.

I built a new widget last night that will link to each new Odysseus Medal nominee as it comes in. This is something I’ve been planning to do for a while, but I took care of it last night in response to a goad from Drew Meyers at Zillow.

You can find it live in the sidebar to the right, but this is what the little toy looks like:

Each new nominee will be reflected in this list, posting blog-style, most recent nominee on top. I’ll have to moderate the entries for spam and porn, but I’ve built tools to enable me to amend the list by means of clickable links from my email — the power of PHP. This week’s list is semi-sorta randomized, because I didn’t have the standing nominations sorted by their date and time of entry.

What Drew was interested in is something like TechMeme for the RE.net. I don’t think we’re big enough to justify something like that, or for it to make much sense even if someone were to do it. But the Long List of Odysseus Medal nominees is already a fairly comprehensive list of important posts in real estate weblogging. The Short List is selected by me, but the Long List is inherently democratic: Anyone can nominate anything. This widget will provide an added incentive to nominate good posts.

The widget itself is not complicated, and I built it to be shared. It’s designed to work flexibly in your sidebar without clashing with your look and feel. In other words, it should take on the characteristics of your Cascading Style Sheet, not mine. If you want to deploy the widget, it’s dread simple. Copy this line of code:

<?php
include ("http://bloodhoundrealty.com/BloodhoundBlog/TheLongList.php");
?>

and paste it on a line of its own in your “sidebar.php” file for your currently active theme. FTP that into the appropriate folder on your file server and you’re done. (Note: These instructions presume WordPress and an FTP connection. If you know how to deploy this code in another blogging platform, or if you know how to edit theme files from within WordPress, speak up in the comments.)

Let me know if you can get it to break or if it’s not behaving with your style sheet.

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