Now that the Great Noblegarden Blog Hunt is over, I figure it’s a good time to share some of the hiding ideas (and coding) that I used this year. This way you can find the ones you missed as well as give folks some ideas for next time! 😉

And yes, that would be the bunny (and egg) you were looking for to the right.

Obvious Eggs

Most of the eggs that I hid were just stuck into the various posts. There was not real subterfuge here, I was just making sure that if anyone tried to Google the words ‘Egg’ or ‘Found’ they would get lots of unrealted images. These were put in every post in every category during the April 1st-7th timeframe.

I also hit an egg in the Footer and Sidebar disclaimer. Again, these were very simple image insertions so I’m not going to detail how those were done.

There are a total of 26 false eggs hidden on the website, including the eggs hidden within other images. Two of these eggs had mouse-over hints: the Saturday Story Prompts icon let you know you were looking for the rabbit and egg and the image let you know you were looking for a picture of a single egg.

Header Image

I hid an egg in the Perish Twice header tag, which is the same trick I pulled last year. I did this by adding a bit of code to the current tagline geneartor. I just comment it out in the off-season.

	
< ?php bloginfo( 'name' ); ?>
	
	

	< ?php $category = get_the_category(); 
	$toprank = $category[0]->cat_name;
	if (is_category()) {
		// If the page is displaying a category then try to match the category name
		if ($toprank == '1 - Unquiet Bones') {
			echo " Putting Dreams to Paper";
		} elseif ($toprank == '2 - Custom-Models.com') {
			echo " Custom Model Horses in Every Hue!";
		} elseif ($toprank == '3 - Perish Twice') {
			echo " Of Dual-boxing and Death";
		//  This next bit is used for the Noblegarden Egg Hunt
			echo "";
		} elseif ($toprank == '4 - Everyday Dragons') {
			echo " Remembering How to Fly";
		} elseif ($toprank =='5 - View From the Molehill') {
			echo " Impersonating a Grownup with the Best of Them!";
		} elseif ($toprank =='6 - Martha.net') {
			echo " There's no place like 127.0.0.1";
		} else {
			//This was just to check and see if posts were missing categories
			echo " Note to Self : Fix top level category for this post";
		}
	} else {
		//If the page is not a category, they use the default catchphrase
		echo get_bloginfo('description'); 
		} ?>
	
	

RSS Feed

The next thing I did was add eggs to the RSS feed on the sidebar

I have the WP Social Blogroll plugin installed and this gives me a field called Image Adrress in the Advance section of the Edit Link page. I just took a handful of the more active WoW blogs and put and egg image in the field—which overrode their normal RSS icon.

This one was more subtle, so I’m not sure how many people noticed them, but I figured it would be a fun bit of confusion for those out hunting.

This is a bit of a pain to undo, since it means checking the field on all of my WoW links, but it was totally worth it! 😀

Next Year’s Plans

I think I’m going to stick with the same ‘hiding in plain sight’ approach for next year. Mostly because it’s fun to hide all of the fake eggs—although I might offer a prize for whoever manages to track them all down. *ponders*