Slopjongs weblog » One Word A Day

The purpose of this blog is to improve my English. I'm sure you can help me.
Please write comments and make suggestions.

One Word A Day

This is my new plugin that displays a new English word in the sidebar every day. Furthermore a quiz is included. If you select the correct choice you can play a sound file to listen to that word.

To see One Word A Day in action take a look in my sidebar.

To reduce unneeded traffic I built a cache for it.

Download

My personal twitter account
My developer account

Notes

Only on workdays a new word appears. So don’t be inpatient if the word’s not changing on the weekend and holidays.

30 Comments

By Archimedes, March 20, 2009 @ 6:29 pm

Well, it’s somehow nice. But remembering my english lessons as a pupil at my old school, we wrote tests on 100 to 300 words each week. So I doubt that those 5 words are of much use if you don’t have a good basic vocabulary.
And you have to remember: English is a spoken language. Speaking some English every day – with a native english speaker – would be much better, but right now I can’t think of any (simple and free) service to somehow force you to speak good (!) English.
Oh, well, actually, I do… I think I have to write that one down over at my blog
By slopjong, March 20, 2009 @ 9:03 pm

The plugin for whom I wrote it is a native English speaker. Learning a couple of hundreds of words in a week isn’t hat effective. Most you will have forgotten very soon. To get one word a day by email plus reading English plus listening to English radio plus watching English movies plus travelling to foreing countries where I have to speak English is my way to learn English continuously. I think you didn’t notice that I wrote my One Word A Day plugin because I felt driven to do some little programming stuff for WordPress.
By Lorraine, March 21, 2009 @ 5:17 pm

I see your blog continues to show ‘twittering’ as the word-of-the-day. I installed this plug-in three days ago and the word has not changed.

Any fixes?
By slopjong, March 21, 2009 @ 9:05 pm

The plugin works fine. Only on work days a new word is published.
By slopjong, March 24, 2009 @ 9:30 am

Oh my plugin doesn’t work anymore. At the moment I can’t go online with my MacBook. I arrived in Sweden yesterday and I’m using a guest computer right now.

Looking forward to fix the problem as soon as possible.
By Pete, April 11, 2009 @ 12:22 pm

This plugin is called One Word a Day and yet my plugin has not updated its word/expression in 3 days. Is the feed no longer alive? What’s going on?
By slopjong, April 11, 2009 @ 7:31 pm

Only on workdays the word changes.
By slopjong, April 20, 2009 @ 11:20 am

The owad website wasn’t available last night. Thus the last entry is empty. Please delete
in your cache file. DON’T delete the last tag
.
By Sorin, May 5, 2009 @ 12:49 am

Hello,

My website is onewordday.com and i want to know if i can use the plugin One Word Day to show the word in the post and not in sidebar?!

Or if you have some suggestion for this project i will glade to listen.

Thank you,

Sorin
By slopjong, May 5, 2009 @ 10:40 am

Thanks for your interest. It’s not possible yet, but I’ll add a shortcode to it
By Lorraine, May 5, 2009 @ 5:54 pm

I installed the 0.2.2 update and received this message:

Warning: file_put_contents(wp-content/plugins/one-word-a-day/cache/words.xml) [function.file-put-contents]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/lewatson/ktw/ktw_blog/wp-content/plugins/one-word-a-day/owad.php on line 68

I had no problems or warning messages installing the original version.

Thoughts on what needs to be fixed?
By Sorin, May 5, 2009 @ 8:42 pm

@slopjong you can help me with this shortcode?
By Kronester, May 5, 2009 @ 9:42 pm

Leider habe ich seit dem letzten Update beim reaktivieren des Plugin (automatische Installation) ein Problem. Musste mein OWAD leider deaktivieren.
Ich finde das Teil echt super, bin aber noch nicht dazugekommen auf Fehlersuche zu gehen.

Hier auf jeden Fall mal die Meldungen die bei mir auftauchen:

Warning: file_put_contents(wp-content/plugins/one-word-a-day/cache/words.xml) [function.file-put-contents]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /homepages/25/d13364381/htdocs/kroni_de/wp-content/plugins/one-word-a-day/owad.php on line 68

Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by (output started at /homepages/25/d13364381/htdocs/kroni_de/wp-content/plugins/one-word-a-day/owad.php:68) in /homepages/25/d13364381/htdocs/kroni_de/wp-content/plugins/wp-forum/cookie.php on line 21
By slopjong, May 6, 2009 @ 7:52 am

@Sorin: I’ll code it today.

@Kronester: file_put_contents has created the file. I’ve just seen that my xml template wasn’t right. Your file words.xml exists but the first line is empty. This is not allowed in a xml file. Please remove the empty line from “../one-word-a-day/cache/words.xml”

@Lorraine: Please tell me your blog address. I think your problem is the same.
By Kronester, May 6, 2009 @ 9:55 pm

@slopjong: My problem already persists. I think there is something depending on rigths or similar. I don’t understand your function but there should’nt be a call to the file_put_contents function if the words.xml file already exists?

I removed the empty line .. no change. I reinstalled then plugin … the error persists.

The function only write a text to a file. I don’t think that there is a problem with the xml format. The error occurs when trying to write the file!

If you have any further ideas I would be very happy to here from you.
By Kronester, May 6, 2009 @ 9:59 pm

Ups, the widget is working but the error is already persisting in admin area (On the topmost part of the screen).

Any Ideas?
By slopjong, May 7, 2009 @ 12:56 am

@Kronester: I expierenced a strange behaviour of the command file_put_contents. Sometimes it doesn’t work at all. I refactored the code that should work but I’ll check it in after my wellness sleep

Sorry for this late update but I had a lecture, speedskating training and shopping today.
By slopjong, May 7, 2009 @ 6:31 pm

No panic! The update will come soon.

I created a shortcode like that: [owad date=""]

As date a string formatted like “2009-05-06″ or “post_date” can be given. To translate “post_date” I have to access the post loop information but I wasn’t able to find out how to access to it. Maybe you can give me a hint?

So far I’m going to speedskate a bit and after that I’m going to the cinema.
By Kronester, May 8, 2009 @ 3:37 pm

Somthing like that?
http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags/the_time
By slopjong, May 8, 2009 @ 3:55 pm

This is a template tag. I solved it yesterday with “global $post; $date = $post->post_date;”
By slopjong, May 19, 2009 @ 3:20 pm

The new release was successfuly tested in WP 2.7.1 but not in WP 2.8. Because the WP 2.8 upgrade will be available soon I delay my plugin’s update until it works with the current developer version. New features will be shortcode support for using OWAD in posts and pages. Furthermore a post generator can be activated to publish a post containg the new word automatically.

Stay tuned.
By slopjong, June 30, 2009 @ 1:42 am

I’ve just released the new version which fixes a text encoding issue that bricks your blog.
By slopjong, June 30, 2009 @ 1:43 am

Please delete the last entry or the cache file by itself to solve the problem.
By Moni, August 19, 2009 @ 12:23 am

Hello

Thank you for the plugin..

I have the side bar widget but the OWAD also shows up in the post automatically at midnight…

HOW do I stop that happening? I only want the sidebar widget…

In the settings it says .. Do you wish a daily post? and I have clicked NO… still I am getting OWAD in post..

Please advise..
By Maurice, September 17, 2009 @ 12:44 am

I set up your widget, and have the DO NOT post a message selected. It has posted a new message two days running. Not nice. Very impolite.

Since it does not do what it says it will, I am deleting it. If you fix it, I’ll consider re-installing it.
By slopjong, September 17, 2009 @ 8:06 am

@Moni, @Maurice:

That’s a bug. I couldn’t figure out yet why this is happens. At the moment I’m very busy but you’re welcome to co-develop One Word A Day.
By Ovidiu, November 4, 2009 @ 2:40 pm

is it possible to stop the plugin from adding a comment underneath?

I’d gladly insert a backlink to your site, but not as a comment

or maybe if we could change the comment author, that would be ok….
By james, January 20, 2010 @ 1:36 am

I don’t see it!
By Slopjong, January 20, 2010 @ 12:38 pm

What don’t you see?

I have deactivated the plugin on my blog due to memory limits of my webspace provider. I’ll activate it again after an upgrade.