The Geeky Junkyard of kingler

I was looking for a weather plugin for WordPress for the past several days, and found the following ones:

• Weather Icon 2 from Jeremiah is a well-designed plugin for WordPress based on “My Weather” module for Mamboserver, which pulls updates from National Weather Service. It comes with an admin interface and multi-language support.
• Weather Report 2.2 is another plugin based on the National Weather Service data. It is highly customizable, since it will only output text. But we like icons, don’t we?
• Lastly but not least, GetWeather written by Jeff (the author of WP-ShortStat Plugin) is a simple plugin to get weather updates from weather.com. This plugin can actually show more information than the Weather Icon 2 plugin, like current time, daily high/low temperature. Addiontionally, you can download more weather iconsets from the web, just do a search for “weather iconsets” (try this).

I like the simple feature of GetWeather, and recommend it to blog pros, because it may need a bit of hacking into the PHP code to get the effects you want. But if you just want an easy way to set up a weather information on your blog site, use Weather Icon 2 instead. It is really easy to install and configure.
In order to set up the plugin to show your local weather, you’ll need a city code:

• For Weather Icon 2, visit the city list and do a search.
• For GetWeather, you can use zip code if you are in the U.S. , for other locations, go to weather.com and search for your city. On the URL, you can find the a code looks like this : CHXX0116 (Shanghai, China).

Last note:
Because the old-fashioned Microsoft IE has some issues handling the alpha transparancy in PNG images (here is a good discussion), you may want to use GIF files to support IE users. Weather Icon 2 comes with the option of using GIF iconsets instead of the default PNG images, so if you have issues with the transparancy in IE, try using the GIF iconsets. GetWeather uses PNG images, and tries to overcome the IE issue by adding a alphaTransparancy filter in the CSS style, but if it doesn’t work for you, you’ll need to spend a lot more time hacking around…

It;s a bit weird for me to put Simplified Chinese translations on this English-only site.
So, I decided to set up a Chinese version. Hope this will help promote the use of WordPress in more Chinese bloggers.

Randy has released StatTraq Beta 1.0b, which is a site statistics logging plugin for WordPress. I just tested it in WP 1.5.

Here are the basic installation steps:

• Download the zip file and unzip into the root directory of WordPress, or unzip in local computer and upload using FTP.
• Run the installation script, located in wp-stattraq/stattraq-install.php and create the table in database.
• It’s working now! Just go to wp-stattraq/ to see your site statistics.

Google Sitemap is a great plugin for WP written by Arne Brachhold.
The multi-language support in the plugin makes it really easy for me to compile this simplified Chinese language pack. Hope it is useful.

Download the zip file here

Installation:

• Unzip the file into wp-content/plugin folder.
• Modify the language setting of WordPress into Simplified Chinese: ‘zh_CN’. Refer to WordPress Localization Guide for more instructions.
• Go to admin page -> Options -> Sitemap, and you should see the config page in Simplified Chinese now.

Update: Just found out June6 made a Simplified Chinese translation just 1 day before. What a coincidence!