Sunday Afternoon Hacking

I was writing a blog post earlier today and I suddenly found myself wishing that I could enhance my WordPress blog to give a word count in my blog entries. A cursory examination of the available plugins revealed a stark lack of any good plugins. (There were a couple peoples’ blogs where they said “I just wrote this plugin” but there wasn’t even a stupid link to download anything.)

So as a bit of a diversion, I wrote my first formal WordPress plugin to add this functionality. (And if you notice either on my main page or the single-entry view page, there’s a Word Count now showing!)

I even went a bit further and explored “internationalization” and figured out how to nationalize the plugin so it could display that “Word Count” label in French or Spanish. (The two languages I know well enough to translate. Maybe I’ll look up my Russian later.) And being the geek that I am, I’ve got to say it was incredible fun spending a few hours on my weekend to toy around and put this together. I love being a geek!

I’ve setup a static software page for my MTW Word Count Plugin.

Author: Murray Todd Williams

I live in Austin, Texas. I'm enthusiastic about food, wine, programming (especially Scala), tennis and politics. I've worked for Accenture for over 12 years where I'm a Product Manager for suite of analytical business applications. View all posts by Murray Todd Williams