This is the second plug-in from the same author as WP-BlackCheck. However, this has nothing to do with fighting random spammers from dropping links to their sites into comments on your blog. Instead, this helps to promote your site wherever you are able to display a banner. For an example of the output this plug-in provides, see the graphic below.
WP-HeadlineAnimator takes your most recent blog posts’ titles, combines them with your chosen background, and then creates an animated GIF each time you add or edit a post. If you are displaying the banner on a normal website, you’d just use the normal IMG tag, in the middle of a href=”https://chrismerriman.com/ and /a , if you wanted the graphic to be linked back to your site. (Obviously I’ve left out the brackets here, so it displays properly as text.)
If you wanted to include the graphic as a link in your forum signatures (assuming they use one of the major forum software apps), the code would look something like this – [url=https://chrismerriman.com/][img]https://chrismerriman.com/wp-content/animator.gif[/img][/url] – pretty much the same as the HTML version, but with square brackets and different labels for the tags.
You will need to supply your own TTF file and upload it to the plug-in’s directory, however, if you browse your own hard drive and navigate to c:\windows\fonts , you will find a lot there, and if you have some flavour of Linux installed, I’m going to assume you know what you’re doing already. Should you wish to save your monthly bandwidth allowance on the server your blog is based, you can remotely store the created GIF on a different server. There are a few other options available, such as tweaking the colours, timing, amount of posts displayed and the format the blog post’s date should take.
If you mis-configure the plug-in by giving the wrong path to the background PNG or TTF files, the text to the left will appear in bright red, to give you a clue as to why no GIF has yet been created. If you have problems or suggested new features, be sure to check out the blog of the author and leave a comment.