SciBuff.com

See the real thing in the right column of this blog. This is a fully functional widget with data directly from Galaxy Zoo.

Although the plugin is now available for download, the process to request the API key is not yet in place (so the plugin will not yet display any data for you). If you wish to participate in the beta testing, just sign up for Galaxy Zoo (and Galaxy Zoo Forums) and wait for an announcement (which should be coming in not distant future).

The Galaxy Zoo Wordpress Plugin widgets sample preview

This plugin offers two WordPress widgets through which users can display data from their accounts on Galaxy Zoo.

The first widget, ‘Galaxy Zoo’, display general stats such as the username, the date the user joined Galaxy Zoo, the number of galaxy classifications  and the latest classified galaxy.

The Galaxy Zoo Wordpress Plugin widgets sample preview (closeup)

The second widget, ‘Galaxy Zoo Favorites’, displays thumbnail images of galaxies the user selected as his/er favorites (using the Galaxy Zoo’s My Galaxies page)

Both widget are completely customizable via the widget’s control panel and style-able via a separate css file(s).

The Galaxy Zoo Wordpress Plugin Admin Panel

Galaxy Zoo is an online astronomy project which invites members of the public to assist in classifying over a million galaxies. It is an example of Citizen science as it enlists the help of members of the public to help in scientific research.

The Galaxy Zoo files contain almost a quarter of a million galaxies which have been imaged with a camera attached to a robotic telescope the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

I like the Twitter Tools plugin for Wordpress that sends a message about my new blog posts automatically to my Twitter Account. However, ever since the twitter searches became popular (i.e. TwitterFall), I thought such automatic messages should also include search tags.

Therefore, I wrote a very simple plugin to automatically add  twitter search tags, based on the post tags, to the “New Blog Post” twitter status messages. Furthermore, since twitter limits the status message length to 140 characters I have also added my favorite URL shortener service to save more space for the search tags. Using this plugin the automated status message will have a format of

	New Blog Post: [Post Title] [Post Url] #tag1 #tag2 #tag3

In this initial release, the twitter search tags are created automatically from the tags assigned to the post. If the plugin turns out to be popular I will add some sort of customization and options panels to the Dashboard in the future.

Download the Twitter Tools Search Tags plugin