Lorelle’s signature has always stood out as a beautiful example of calligraphy and adds a different dimension to her blog by effortlessly imbibing that much-needed “personal touch” to all her posts. That signature in question has intrigued me since I came upon her blog quite sometime back and I’ve wanted one of my own ever since. Incidentally, if you’re not in the know, Lorelle’s blog is one of the most valuable resource of WordPress and blogging in general out there on the web.
However, the ardent desire to own one never really materialised as I’m one of those “graphically challenged” folks 
No amount of time spent with an ultra steady hand at the mouse was good enough for me to conjure one – that is, till MyLiveSignature came to my rescue. MyLiveSingature was a chance discovery while I was browsing through some random sites and if you will, ‘I’ve never been so grateful’ for a particular bit of information as this. The site allows anyone to create fancy virtual signatures that can be appended to emails, blog posts, forums signatures and what not. To top it all, these signatures so totally look like real life hand-scribed signatures.
How to go about getting one for yourself?
To start with you’ve register yourself with MyLiveSignature, which comes for free. The site sports a nice web based wizard interface that allows you to choose between 120+ fonts as well as a wide variety of parameters like size, colour, slope etc. all of which combine to render a singature that bears a very close resemblance to your real-life one.
Does this really come for free?
Yup. Pretty much so. The basic signature generation service is absolutely free. However, if you wish, for a nominal price ($19.95) you can get yourself an animated signature designed by the professional animators at MyLiveSignature. They also offer a graphical reconstruction service (of your real-life signature) if you prefer that to the computer generated one. This too is a viable option which comes for a meagre $9.95 – but then again the availability of extremely cheap yet high-resolution scanners makes this service kind of redundant.
What’s all this got to do with a WordPress plug-in?
This is where I step in. Following Lorelle’s tracks, I wanted to add that personal touch to all my posts. MyLiveSignature provides you with the HTML code that displays your signature virtually anywhere on a site. If you know even a bit about the inner workings of WordPress, it’d be easy for you to edit the template and include this code in the “loop” to make it appear after each of your posts… but nothing like a simple plug-in which does the same for you without ever requiring you to do any messy template editing.
LiveSig is a WordPress plug-in that automatically inserts your MyLiveSignature code after each of your WordPress posts making it seem like each post has been personally signed by you.
Current Version
- 0.4
Features
- Once the MyLiveSignature HTML code has been fed into the plug-in, the plug-in appends your virtual signature at the end of each of your posts.
- Multi-author blogs are supported. However, as of now, only a user whose Role permits changing of plug-in settings (namely, Administrator) can setup the signatures for individual users. The LiveSig Options page isn’t available to non-admin users (Editors / Authors / Contributors).
Requirements
- WordPress 2.1.x – but should function properly with the 2.0.x line too.
Download
LiveSig 
(19.5 KiB, 4,284 downloads)
Installation
Once downloaded, simply…
- Unzip & Copy the plug-in file into your WordPress plug-ins folder.
- Activate the plug-in from the Plug-in Manager in WordPress.
- Visit the Options / Settings menu and find a new item called LiveSig. Click on that to get to the LiveSig Options page. Once there simply select an appropriate user, enter the corresponding MyLiveSignature code and hit Save.
Showcase (the plug-in in action)
Subversion Repository
Change Log
- Version 0.4 (2008-05-25)
- Added the option to be able to specify Signature Placement – i.e. at the end of posts on the blog’s front page, at the end of individual posts (single mode) or for both.
- Removed jQuery library that was being bundled with the plug-in. Since this plug-in uses jQuery only in the administration / configuration interface and in such cases jQuery is provided by WordPress itself, there was no need to include a jQuery release and increase the size of the bundle. Apart from that, inclusion of jQuery twice (once by WP and then by LiveSig) was causing a minor JS Warning to be thrown. That has been eliminated now.
- Version 0.2.5 (2008-05-19)
- Minor fix in the UI (Administration Panel) – where the list of users didn’t clear out while selecting a different Roles – in cases, where that particular Role didn’t have any users belonging to it.
- Version 0.2 (2008-05-19)
- Added multi-author support. If a blog has more than 1 author, LiveSig can display singatures that are unique to each in appropriate posts.
Please Note
I offer support for my plug-ins via the Chaos Laboratory Support Forum only. I will NOT respond to support queries left in the comment section below and, in most cases, will also not publish them. Of course, if you’d like to say something nice or helpful, feel free to leave a comment!
If you find this plug-in useful, please consider making a donation towards further development of this useful little utility.
Alternatively, you can help me by reviewing this post by clicking on the following link. Believe it or not, this will help us both earn some cash from PayPerPost.
MyLiveSignature found via: Freakitude Technology Blog
