Image by Aaron Schmidt.

If you run a WordPress blog, you are surely familiar with the Hello Dolly plugin by Matt Mullenweg. It is a simple little plugin that displays a line from the song “Hello Dolly” in the upper-right corner of the admin screens.

I took the code for that plugin and changed it so that it now randomly displays one of Ranganathan’s five laws of library science. So instead of seeing, e.g., “You’re lookin’ swell, Dolly” on your WordPress admin screen, you’ll see instead something like “The library is a growing organism.”

I call it, of course, “Hello Ranganathan.” You can download the file here: Hello Ranganathan

Follow the usual steps to install the plugin: unzip it (it’s just one php file) and upload it to your wp-content/plugins directory. Then activate it on the Plugins screen. And get those laws drilled into your head every time you post.

As you might expect, I’m not the first one to customize the “Hello Dolly” plugin. Also, I employed this little fix so you won’t get a blank line 1/6 of the time.