For some of you who may remember, there was a feature a few years ago on DBStract that let people receive notifications on their cell phones when new entries were made to their tables. The method used was one where you entered your phone number, and provider and it would send you an SMS-email message. It worked but it wasn’t a method I was happy with, and eventually removed it. Thanks to Twilio.com and their SMS gateway, we’ve now integrated a new solution to receiving SMS notifications. When you create or edit a table, you now have the option to select to received text messages when someone fills out a form on your site (or where ever you’ve placed a form). This works well for people on the go who still want to get notified when someone fills out a form, either for a support request, article submission, events, you name it. This is also the first of several new updates DBStract will be receiving in the new little while, which I’m pretty happy about.

On my main wordpress site (this one your reading now), I like to display a single line below each RSS feed item that tells people quickly about some of my other sites. The ad appears like this:

The code for it is pretty straight forward, and can also be used to display a copyright message linking to your site, or anything along those lines. Place the following code in your theme’s functions.php file:

function insertAds($content) {
    if(is_feed()) {
        srand((float) microtime() * 10000000);
        $banners = array();
        $banners[] = 'Banner number 1. <a href="http://www.somerandomsite/" target="_blank">Some more banner text</a>';
        $banners[] = 'Banner number 2. <a href="http://www.somerandomsite/" target="_blank">Some more banner text</a>';
        $banners[] = 'Banner number 3. <a href="http://www.somerandomsite/" target="_blank">Some more banner text</a>';
        $banners[] = 'Banner number 4. <a href="http://www.somerandomsite/" target="_blank">Some more banner text</a>';
        $rn = array_rand($banners);
        $content = $content.'<hr />'.$banners[$rn];
    }
    return $content;
}
add_filter('the_excerpt_rss', 'insertAds');
add_filter('the_content', 'insertAds');

You could also replace this with banner images. Anyway, what this does is randomly select which text to display on your rss feed items. So for each article, you could have a different ad appearing. If you wanted to use this to display only one message (like a copyright), you’d use this version:

function insertMsg($content) {
    if(is_feed()) {
        $banner = 'You are reading my blog. <a href="http://www.linktoblog/" target="_blank">Name of your blog</a>';
        $content = $content.'<hr />'.$banner;
    }
    return $content;
}
add_filter('the_excerpt_rss', 'insertMsg');
add_filter('the_content', 'insertMsg');

That’s it, like I said, it’s a quick function, but it serves it’s purpose.