Crunchbase Widget WordPress plugin

I was talking to my buddy Shoemoney on IM this weekend, and he mentioned that he thought there was a need for a good WordPress CrunchBase plugin, to easily integrate CrunchBase widgets into your posts without having to create the widget on the CrunchBase site, and then copy the widget code into your own post.

The easiest way of integrating it was to come up with some sort of shortcode for it, which has been made incredibly easy with the new Shortcode API, with which I quickly started coding my CrunchBase widget.

So the first thing I quickly created was a plugin that would respond to, for instance, [cbcompany]Amazon[/cbcompany] and [cbperson]Jeremy Schoemaker[/cbperson]. This was needlessly complex, as Rob Olson of TechCrunch, who had by then seen it, noted, an easier way of doing this would be to do [cb type="company"]Amazon[/cb].

Since CrunchBase has 4 different types of records; company, person, product and financial, this shortcode could easily work for all four of them. I've released the 1.0 plugin last saturday, and this morning it got featured in a post on TechCrunch.

I noticed Shoemoney was using the new plugin on a post on Google doesn't dig Digg after all, and noticed that in the feed, when the javascript for the widget obviously isn't working, it got kinda ugly, as it would take 3 lines of text and 3 links to basically say: here's the info on this company in CrunchBase.

So I've now tweaked the feed output in version 1.1, so it will only add a link in the feed with the text "CrunchBase information on so and so".

A big thanks to Shoemoney and Rob Olson for helping me make this nice little plugin and featuring it, everybody else: enjoy!

Of course, if someone has good ideas on new functionality I could add to this CrunchBase widget, by all means, let me know in the comments!

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