Author Lisa Lagaly

I decided I would make my ‘Fewer’ themed website more exciting by having random excerpts of my books pop up in the blank space under the page titles. If you are reading this, you can see the Fewer theme devotes 1/3 of the left side of the computer monitor to block-free space, perfect for a pop-up, which hopefully made an appearance. After much trial and disappointment, I finally found a pop-up plugin that was fairly easy to use and allowed me to have the popup window on the side instead of the center or bottom of the screen. I’ll do my best to remember everything I did so you can try this too. You will need at least the personal WordPress plan because this requires plugins.

First, install and activate the FREE versions of two plugins: Hustle by WPMU DEV and Random Content by Endo Creative. Then follow the instructions below for each plugin.

Random Content

1. Random Content shows up in the Admin menu on the left after activation. If you hover over it, you’ll see four options: Random Content, Add New Random Content, Groups, and Go Pro. Choose Add New Random Content.
2. You’ll go to what looks like a blank page. You can edit it like a page too. Note though, that the title won’t show in the pop-up, at least it didn’t on my computer, so you may need to add a heading.
3. Add your excerpt.
4. In the sidebar on the right, under the Random Content tab, under Group, click Add New Group and type in a group name in the ‘NEW CATEGORY NAME’ box, then click the button with the same name. You will place all of your excerpts into this category.
5. PUBLISH your except, otherwise it won’t appear in category group.
6. At the top of the sidebar next to the title line, click the three vertical dots and duplicate the page. Edit and add your next excerpt to the new page.
7. After you’ve published all your excerpts, hit the back button at the top left so you’re back to the Admin menu. Choose Random Content > Groups. This will pull up a page with a list of all your random groups. You should see the one you made and the number of excerpt pages you saved next to it.

Hustle

1. Click on Hustle in the Admin menu.
2. Choose create under Slide-ins. If you want to have control over where the window goes, this is the only option you can use.
3. A window pops-up (!). Give your pop-up a name and choose “Informational”
4. In the Choose a Template Window, select ‘start from scratch’.
5. The next window in Content. The only thing I did here was add a short code to the Random content. Entering the number wouldn’t work. I ended up just putting “

   Luna Lynn was flabbergasted. Honey decided she really liked that word. Bernadette was also flabbergasted.

   “I can’t believe this,” Lynn said again, moving the mouse around the screen as if that was going to reveal the page Honey was showing her on the college board site was fake. “Brayton took the test three times and only got a 1420.”

   A 1420 wasn’t bad, but Honey couldn’t help but be a little smug that she’d done better than head bully. “Which college am I going to go to? Do I get to choose? I want one that offers a major in chemical physics.”

   “You want what now?” Bernadette asked.

   “Chemical physics. It’s the study of chemical processes while thinking like a physicist.”

   “Ah, well, I’m on the board of our local college where most of the wolves attend. I was thinking you could go there,” Luna Lynn said. “I’m sure they have both chemistry and physics. Maybe you could do a double major?”

   “That would work. It would give me something to build off of. I could always go to another college and get a masters or PhD in the field if I needed.”

   “O.M.G. You are serious!” That was Bernadette again.

   Luna Lynn gave Bernadette a sour glance. “Why are you surprised by this? She’s only fourteen and she got a perfect score on the SAT. She can do whatever she wants.”

   Excerpt from Rogue, Curse of the Hybrids Book 1

   ” (It’s in quotes so the random content doesn’t show up in this article.)
6. Click on the Appearance window at the bottom of the page.
7. In the Appearance window, choose Compact unless you want the stuff behind the popup window to be grayed out. You can change that feature if you use the default option, but it’s simpler to just start with compact in the first place. Ask me how I know.
8. I went with Gray Slate for colors, but it’s easy to optimize your own palette, just choose ‘Create custom palette’ at the bottom of the ‘select a color palette’ scroll down menu .
9. To change the background colors and font colors of your pop-up, DO NOT enable the Vanilla theme. All the ‘colors’ and ‘advanced’ options disappear.
10. Change the colors and advanced options to meet your specifications. Make sure you save your changes before you preview because they disappear when you come back.
11. For Slide in size, I customized the width to be 30% and the height to be 60%.
12. On the Visibility page, click on add conditions and choose where you want the popup to appear. I chose pages.
13. On the Behavior page the only thing I changed was the slide-in-position so that my window comes in from the side (it’s a box with arrows around it).

That’s it. You can, of course, use Hustle to make a lot of different kinds of pop-up windows. Maybe I’ll add more someday.