NASA Image Of The Day plugin
Very simple widget plugin that shows the NASA Image Of The Day thumbnail and a few words of text. Clicking on the thumbnail opens the correct NASA page for a larger image and accompanying text. The plugin now uses a NASA RSS feed for information. No local storage needed, the feed and image is fetched every time. Does anyone need caching here?
Installation instructions:
Unzip in wp-content/plugins directory, enable plugin and then use as any other WordPress widget.
Download NASA Image Of The Day plugin
If you have a question or other comment, use the form below. Thank you!
Bookmark to:
Question .. what bookmark plug-in are you using?
1I’m using Social Bookmarking RELOADED (http://www.valent-blog.eu/social-bookmarking-reloaded/). I used to use Gregarious, but that didn’t work too well with 2.5, so decided to try something new. Looks good and works fine for me.
2Hi, you’re widget is very interesting but I’ve a problem in WordPress 2.5…
When I’ve put the widget, I saw:
Warning: fopen() [function.fopen]: URL file-access is disabled in the server configuration in /homepages/8/d216996658/htdocs/blog/wp-content/plugins/nasa_image_of_the_day.php on line 59
Warning: fopen(http://www.nasa.gov/home/index.html) [function.fopen]: failed to open stream: no suitable wrapper could be found in /homepages/8/d216996658/htdocs/blog/wp-content/plugins/nasa_image_of_the_day.php on line 59
NIOTD not available
Then… Can’t I use this plugin?
3Hi BlackHole!
There is a PHP option in your php.ini file (the configuration file for your PHP installation) called allow_url_fopen . In your case this config option is not set, which then stops PHP scripts from opening external URLs. This is for security reasons, so random scripts can’t fetch unwanted files. To use this widget, you need to change that to true like this:
allow_url_fopen = On
You may have to ask your webhotel provider if they can do this for you if you do not run your own server. See
4http://php.net/manual/en/ref.filesystem.php#ini.allow-url-fopen
for more information. Hope this helps!
Thank you very much ^^
5Hi there.
6Your NASA plugin is very nice.
I tried but not made it to center the NASA box to the column. By box I mean the title, the imageand the left aligned text.
Thank you for your response.
Keep up the good work.
Nick from Greece
Hi Nicholas
You can use the CSS file in your theme to align the text and the image in the plugin to where you want. Try adding something like this to the style.css file in your theme directory:
#nasa-iotd { text-align: center; }
#nasa-iotd img {
margin-left: auto;
margin-right: auto;
display: block;
}
Basically it tells the browser that all text inside an object with the id “nasa-iotd” should be centered. And the same for images inside such objects, although that needs a slightly different method of centering as you can see.
Hope this helps!
OK
7Hi there,
I love this plugin, but for some reason it is not showing the picture anymore. It just shows a very light horizontal line where it should be. Can you help me? I have activated and deactivated it several times.
Thanks,
Tim
8Installed widget, no image, only text, also noticed the one on this site doesn’t have an image. I set the image width to 150 could this be the problem?
9Hi Tim and Gerald!
The plugin can’t handle flash files, and once in a while the NASA image of the day is a flash file instead of an image. It doesn’t occur that often, but I’ll look into adding support for flash as well.
If you’re missing the image several days in a row let me know.
OK
10I had NIOTD 1 and now it won’t show the image.
11I installed NIOTD 2.0 and the image will show but the dashboard stops working. I know I must have something goofed
Hi JS!
12Hm, that sounds very strange. Could you describe how the dashboard stops working? Do you get any errors on screen or in your web server logs? Which WordPress version are you using?
Hi,
13I also have the problem with the picture not showing, only a horizontal line where the picture should be. I am running WordPress 2.6. This problem occurs when viewing in IE, but the problem does not occur when viewing in firefox. There the picture is fine. Is there something I can do to fix the IE problem?
using WP 2.6.2, widget version 2.0 – could you make this thing XHTML compliant? like the tags should be . regards, Mike
14sorry – the blog stripped my tags – I was refering to the break tags – they need a closing / to be XHTML compliant
regards,
15Mike
nevermind – I did it – there are 3 occurences of the br tag in the “print” statement – I just modified those to br / and all is well.
16Hello,
I installed 2.0 (this is the second time) and I always get the IOTD photo one of snoopy – it never changes… I have cookies on, firefox, a mac… not sure what is up… any ideas?
Bryan
17Hi Bryan
18That’s weird. Do other people see that image every time as well? I looked at your site, but couldn’t find where you had the plugin displayed. The IOTD plugin should grab the image live from NASA on every single view, so I can’t really think of too many reasons for this to happen unless your browser somehow caches badly.
OK
I love the NASA-Image-of-the-Day plug-in! I like it so much, I feel bad asking: is there any way to tap into NASA photo galleries that emphasize the astronomy images? Don’t get me wrong: I respect the welders and scientists who make it all possible, but I’d really love a plug-in that has a daily slide show of those astounding pictures of the universe. Anyway, thanks!
19Hi Jimmy!
Nasa has a few galleries online that might be suitable sources for a plugin like the one you want. See the grin.hq.nasa.gov website for categorized images. I’ll see what I can think up.
OK
20Hi,
I’ve upgraded to WP 2.8, and the Nasa Image of the Day plugin has stopped working.
Are you working on an upgrade that is compatible with 2.8?
Thank you for your work on this wonderful plug-in!
Marc
21God dag! Kan jag ladda ner en bild fran din blogg. Av sak med hanvisning till din webbplats!
22Hei Chabrelllgan!
Klart du kan, men mesteparten av bildene jeg har her er hentet fra andre kilder uansett. Så om du henter feks et NASA bilde herfra, så er det NASA sine retningslinjer du må følge.
OK
23Hello,
I am having trouble with editing the Title of the NIOTD plug in. I am not sure where to set the .$title string and have tried multiple places in niotd.php file with no luck.
Can you please advise?
24Hi CJEvil!
The NIOTD plugin has a title-field you can change without having to edit code. When you select the NIOTD widget, there is a Title-option you can use. I.e. WP Dashboard -> Appearance ->Widgets -> drag the NIOTD widget to a sidebar and then use the Title field to change the header. Or do you use the plugin in a different way than this?
OK
25Hi there – thanks for the plugin. I love the concept, but there is one annoying quirk that is likely not your fault. Depending on the summary for the current photo the total widget height can be huge, pushing the page out of proportion. I would like to limit the total height, although I realize I may lose the ‘Read More’ link at the bottom. Could this be done via CSS, maybe?
Thanks for your help.
26