LXPanel is the gnome-panel equivalent for LXDE. There doesn’t seem to be a Trash can plugin for it, and I think that’s just sad. So, I decided to learn how these plugins are coded and make one of my own. I’m not sure if I’ll end up succeeding, but at least it will be a learning experience either way.

I found this page, which outlines a simple plugin that doesn’t do anything. It seems to be a good starting point. I followed the directions and ended up looking at an autoconf project that required a lot of work to get running in Ubuntu. Even though I finally got it to compile, I decided it took way to long to do so. I converted it to a scons project, and now it’s just one directory with a simple build script:

The shared object that’s output is exactly the same size as the one created by autoconf, so that’s good enough for me at the moment. Time to keep hammering away. The code for the example is available here for reuse.

More information here. I wanted to change the appearance a little, so I did this to my theme in WordPress:

I love that.

There are a few ways to install.

1. Download from here.  The most recent stable release will be available.  As of this writing, it’s REL-1.3.
2. Clone the git repository: git clone git://github.com/hank/github-widget.git
3. Get it through WordPress (Work in Progress)

If you use one of the first 2 methods, just drop the resultant directory into wp-content/plugins/.

Using any of the three methods, after you have it installed, go to the Admin panel, Plugins -> Installed.  Then, activate the plugin.  Then, go to Appearance -> Widgets.  Put it into a sidebar, and go look at the results.

Please report any errors or problems as a comment to this post.

UPDATE: I just found out that my minimal searching for ‘Github’ in the plugins area, which found no results when I tried it, was insufficient.  I should have used Google.  Oh, well – at least I know how a widget works now!