I just finished writing a wordpress widget that grabs a list of books from GoodReads (book readers social network) and I’d like to share it with whoever needs it If you want to use this widget you have to use Wordpress and of course have a GoodReads account. 

Features

• Choose any shelf that you want to display
• There are 16 sorting options
• Choose one of the 3 book cover sizes
• Show or hide book title
• Set the length of book title
• Show or hide author name, isbn, user rating, and average rating
• You can also change the display labels for author name, isbn, user rating, and average rating

Download

GoodShelf (171)

Installation

To install it, simply unzip the download file and move/copy goodshelf.php to /wp-content/plugins folder of wordpress. In the admin page, go to Plugin and activate the GoodShelf plugin. After that, you need to configure to get it working. Go to Design or Presentation and select GoodShelf. There is a list of options (mentioned in Features) that you can choose from. The final step is go to Widget to add GoodShelf widget to your sidebar. 

Customization

If you like to customize the widget, below is a list of CSS classes and id associated with the widget that you can style:

• Book list: .goodshelf_ul
• Book item: .goodshelf_li
• Book cover: .goodshelf_cover
• Book description: .goodshelf_text
• Profile link: #profile_link

From left to right: Opera, Flock, Safari, Firefox, Camino, Shiira

These are the web browsers installed on my machine.

How many do you have?

Normally, I use Photoshop to resize my photos because along with resizing photos I also need to apply some filters. A few days ago one of my friends asked me was there any application on Mac that lets him resize a bunch of photos in one go. He also mentioned that he didn’t wanna apply any filters at all and opening Photoshop takes time (it’s true).

Then I figured out that properly we could do that in Automator (a built-in application for automating repetitive tasks). I had never used Automator before but it’s really easy to use, everything is done by drag and drop. After a minute or so, I came up with a small app that does the job perfectly.

If you need to do that task over and over again, you might wanna check this app out. You can download it here ResizePhotos (208). I don’t need to explain how it works because every step in the app is quite explanatory. Enjoy!

This is a brief note about my reflection on choosing a web development framework.

In the last few days, I’ve been busy looking around for different web development frameworks. I’ve found quite a lot and these are some of the major ones - Ruby on Rails, Symfony, Django, CakePHP, CodeIgniter and Zend Framework. Read the rest of this entry »