Rad Geek People's Daily

Earlier this year I showed off a new geegaw for my websites, first at Rad Geek People’s Daily, and then at Feminist Blogs. That’s the Humanized History feature that provides the magic endless scrollbars for Geekery Today and Feminist blogs. I used some WordPress template kludges and a bit of unobtrusive JavaScript to magically fetch older posts for you as you get close to the end of the current page, thus allowing you to keep on scrolling as far back as you want to scroll, without having to stop and click through on older posts / newer posts page links.

The way I implemented the feature, at first, was through some ugly spit-and-bailing wire kludges in the WordPress templates, which would be messy and complicated to replicate elsewhere, and which would fall apart if one ever switched to a different theme from the one they were currently using.

But I’m happy to announce that if you have a WordPress weblog, you, too, can now add a Humanized History magic scroller, with only minimal spit and bailing wire. I’ve packaged as much of the magic as I can into a new WordPress plugin, which I’ve unimaginatively dubbed Humanized History for WordPress, and which is now available for download through my projects website.

The plugin does still require some minimal template hacking, due to unavoidable limitations in WordPress, but the hacking you’ll have to d is nice and contained, and if you’re unfamiliar with WordPress templates, you just follow the step-by-step copy-and-paste instructions provided in the documentation. You should also feel free to contact me if anything is unclear or not working properly for you.

Enjoy, and scroll on!