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!

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 23rd, 2009 at 8:38 pm and is filed under Blogging, Inventions/Creations, Technology, Wordpress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.