wejustblog

WordPress.com users now have the option to turn on falling snow on their blogs, after Matt Mullenweg asked for a falling snow script two days ago. Since it is only for WordPress.com users and not for self-hosted WordPress blogs, I whipped up a plugin that does the same. All you need to do is upload the plugin folder to your plugin directory and activate to see falling snow on your blog.

Wordpress.com users will have the snow until 2nd January but with this you can leave it on for as long as you like, though it does not make much sense to leave it on for too long.

Download at: WordPress Plugins Directory
Plugin version: 1.2
Required WordPress version: Should work with all.
License: Released under the terms of the GNU GPL: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.txt

Installation & Config

To install, upload the folder “let-it-snow” with its contents to “wp-content/plugins/” and activate the plugin in your admin panel. That’s it!
The snowfall is configurable by editing snowstorm.js. More information at original DHTML Snowstorm page.

Support

If it does not work for you. Check that your theme has the wp_head() function call in header.php. If it does not, add <? wp_head(); ?> just before the closing </head> tag.
If the snow is going under or covered by stuff on your page, you need to open up snowstorm.js and change this.o.style.zIndex = 2; at line 192 to something like this.o.style.zIndex = 999;. (Thanks to Torben)
If you have questions or need help, leave a comment here.

Credits

This falling snow script used in this plugin is by Scott Schiller.
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Regua has just released a new version of his Ajax Comments Posting WordPress plugin. The latest version 1.2 release on 21 December, 2007 fixes a bug where WordPress 2.3.1 server-response errors are not posted and also resolves jQuery’s conflict with Prototype. The changelog can be found at http://regua.biz/acp/.

I am actually the one who got the plugin working for WP 2.3.1. The plugin was originally only meant for older versions of WordPress. When I used it for this blog, I did not realize the incompatibilities until everything was in place and response errors like duplicate comments were not fetched. I spent quite a few hours customizing the plugin before that so going for a different plugin and wasting that few hours wasn’t a good idea. After some Googling and looking at the source codes of other jQuery-based commenting scripts I managed to get it to work with WP 2.3.1 and resolved the conflict with Prototype.

As I am not that good with Javascript, Regua has optimized the code and released the plugin as a new version. You can grab it from the WordPress plugin directory. I highly recommend it. Post a comment on this blog to see a demo.