Konami Easter Egg Wordpress Plugin
I am proud to introduce my latest Wordpress Plugin. This one is called “Konami Easter Egg” and it makes it easy for anyone to create custom easter eggs on any Wordpress powered website. If you aren’t quite sure what an easter egg is, let me backup and give you a little history lesson. Easter eggs are hidden secrets that can be found in movies, websites, books, Tivo remote controls, and pretty much anything where the creator has hidden secrets. They are called “easter eggs” because they are hidden treasures that you have to find. The creators of these things often hide them as a wink to other people who know the secret code.
One of the most famous easter eggs was created by video game maker Konami in 1988 when they hid a code in their Contra game that allowed the player to gain 30 extra lives. The code was entered by pushing a sequence of buttons on their controller. The code was “up up down down left right left right b a start select.”
The Konami code has since been used in countless games and has transcended into popular culture. Most recently, the code has been added to Facebook with “start select” being replaced by “enter.” There is even a website dedicated to documenting all the websites that use the Konami code, http://konamicodesites.com/.
I have always been intrigued by easter eggs and have long wanted to be able to add hidden things to websites that I make. When I learned about a javascript file called konami-js available on Google Code I realized that I could make a Wordpress plugin for creating secret codes that reveal hidden messages on a website.
My plugin will hopefully appear in the Wordpress plugin directory soon, but if you would like to test it out ahead of time, please contact me and I will send you a demo.
The Konami Easter Egg plugin is available now through the Wordpress Plugin Directory. Here are the installation instructions:
Click here to view a screenshot of the settings page of the Konami Easter Egg Plugin.
Installation
Installing Konami Easter Egg is very easy and do not require any template modification. Just follow these steps :
1. Upload the folder ‘easter_egg’ to the ‘/wp-content/plugins/’ directory.
2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress.
3. After activating the plugin you should see “Easter Egg” in the sidebar under “Settings.”
4. *IMPORTANT* Before the easter eggs will appear it is important that you enter the name of the outer most Div tag used in your theme templates. This can be found by viewing the source code of a page on your site. The first Div after the will look something like “<div id=”wrapper”>”. Take the name of this div (in this case it would be “wrapper” and enter it in the settings page for the plugin.
5. Enter the YouTube code of the video you would like to show. Change the “key” if you want a unique key combination to unlock the easter egg. Change the message to say something unique. Customize the CSS to change the appearance of your Easter Egg as desired.
6. Congratulations, you did it!
By the way, I wonder what would happen if you entered the Konami code right now. Only one way to find out!
October 11th, 2009 at 5:42 am
Your plugin works great! I love it. Simple to use and great to add to a site. Once i have a little more time to figure out how to best edit the message, i plan to give it my personal touch:). Thanks again for making this awsome plugin
November 24th, 2009 at 12:50 pm
Excellent work. I’ve been looking for something like this and I just found it. Works great. Work on it, improve it even more. Not just with youtube movie but with options like a new page, or goto page or something like that.
Thanks
January 2nd, 2010 at 11:27 pm
This is a great post and makes me think of where I can fit in. I do a little bit of everything mentioned here and I guess I have to find my competitive advantage.
January 7th, 2010 at 7:41 pm
Thanks, this is cool!
Now, I find myself wondering what would be involved in writing the code which would randomly turn on the easter egg and allow it to register only one hit and then turn off again. This would allow a random ‘give away” on the site as a promotional feature. All registered members would get the code but unregistered visitors would not, which would promote registration. The registered site visitors would never know when they could win something.
The plugin could be set to register the one hit only when enabled by the administrator of the site OR set to turn on according to some frequency, like once a month or after some random period of time, etc.
Hmmm….
February 13th, 2010 at 6:31 pm
I really would love to use the plugin. Unfortunately when activated it messes up the header and video section of our website. Is there anything that you could recommend checking?
February 19th, 2010 at 7:20 pm
There seems to be no div id tag anywhere in the source code of my blog. Help!
March 10th, 2010 at 1:30 am
A few of the urls on your site appear broken. You might want to fix them.