I was just reading Clothesknit‘s Amazing Lace entry when I came across the acronym SAHM. I had no idea what it was, and I had to google it to figure it out. Subsequently I noticed that she had also used the abbreviation IK, for Interweave Knits. It was then that I realized how many acronyms knitting bloggers use. IK, WIP, KAL, FO, FP… How overwhelming it would be for a newbie knit blogger to google all these acronyms!

Fortunately, I use the flexiblest of blog tools: WordPress. And fortunately, when I googled “acronym plugin” I came across ubernyms. Ubernyms is a plugin that takes all your acronyms and adds a little tag that will translate them for anyone who doesn’t understand what an OSW is. All you have to do is mouse over the acronym to find out its translation. I’ve added a bunch of knitting acronyms to the library, and will keep doing so as I think of them.

How many acronyms can you think of? What are they? What’s your favourite? The Needle Exchange wants to know!

I’ve seen lots of progress bars on various knitting blogs, and I’ve always really wanted one. I didn’t really like any of the ones I found on the net, so I decided to make my own. They’re dynamically-generated [[PNG]] files. I’ve never used [[PHP]] to generate images before, so it was really cool to learn how to do it. I introduced a neat little colour scale, too; it goes from purple to green to orange to pink! * Girl power! *

I’m planning on offering this as a WordPress plugin to any other knitters who want to include it on their blog. There’ll be a Dashboard interface where you can input your WIPs and edit their percentage finished, and maybe some other features once I think about it more.

If you’d like to have this on your blog, leave me a comment or send me an email and I’ll hack something together quickly. The more responses I get, the bigger the push will be to get this plugin finished!