AstroBlob Banners

AstroBlob lets astronomy associations and their members share remote robotic telescopes. This plugin adds AstroBlob banners and a gallery of your members’ astrophotos to your WordPress site. They link to your association’s page on AstroBlob, or to AstroBlob itself if you are not part of an association.

• One association per site. Pick your association from a list in Settings > AstroBlob. You can also choose “No association (AstroBlob)”.
• Five formats: horizontal (leaderboard), square, vertical (skyscraper), button and card.
• Dark, light and auto themes. The auto theme follows the visitor’s light or dark preference.
• Your own text. Change the title, description and button text. The default text is translatable.
• A shortcode and a block. Use [astroblob_banner] anywhere, or add the “AstroBlob Banner” block with a live preview in the editor.
• Members’ gallery. [astroblob_gallery] and the “AstroBlob Gallery” block show astrophotos that members of your association published on AstroBlob, as a grid, mosaic, carousel, strip or a single featured “photo of the month”. Each photo shows the telescope and observatory it was taken with, and opens in an accessible lightbox. Only images whose authors allowed it are shown.
• Served from your site. Gallery images are copied to your uploads folder and refreshed every hour, so visitors never connect to AstroBlob. Images that their authors stop sharing are deleted from your site.
• Fits your theme. Use the website’s font or the AstroBlob system font, and a normal or small text size.
• Lightweight and accessible. The banner is pure HTML and CSS. The stylesheet loads only on pages that show a banner. It uses no external fonts, scripts or images, and works with a keyboard and with screen readers.
• Private. It sets no cookies and does no tracking on your site.

Shortcode

[astroblob_banner]

Every attribute is optional. If you leave one out, the plugin uses the value from Settings > AstroBlob.

• format: horizontal, square, vertical, button or card
• theme: dark, light or auto
• title, description, button: your own text
• align: left, center or right
• new_tab: yes (default) or no
• campaign: a label for this banner in your referral statistics (default banner)
• font: site (your theme’s font) or system (default for banners)
• text_size: normal (default) or small

Example:

[astroblob_banner format="card" theme="auto" button="Join us on AstroBlob" campaign="sidebar"]

Gallery

[astroblob_gallery]

Shows astrophotos published on AstroBlob by members of the association chosen in Settings > AstroBlob (“No association” shows images from all of AstroBlob). It always ends with a “See more on AstroBlob” button. Every attribute is optional:

• format: grid (default), mosaic, carousel, strip or spotlight (one large featured image)
• sort: latest (default) or popular
• period: 30, 90, 365 or all (default), in days
• count: 1 to 30. The default depends on the format: grid 9, mosaic 12, carousel 10, strip 8, spotlight 1
• columns: 2 to 6, for grid and mosaic (default 3)
• show_title: yes (default) or no. Shows the target and title. The author’s AstroBlob username is shown only if the author allowed it.
• show_details: yes (default) or no. Shows the telescope and observatory on each image, and the capture date in the large views.
• theme: dark, light or auto
• title: an optional heading
• campaign: as for banners
• font: site (default for galleries) or system
• text_size: normal (default) or small

Photo of the month:

[astroblob_gallery format="spotlight" sort="popular" period="30" title="Photo of the month"]

Developers

• Change the API base URL with the ASTROBLOB_API_BASE constant or the astroblob_api_base filter.
• Change the destination URL with the astroblob_banner_url filter, and the markup with astroblob_banner_html.
• Galleries: astroblob_gallery_url, astroblob_gallery_images and astroblob_gallery_html.

External services

This plugin uses the AstroBlob service, which is run by AstroBlob.

1. List of associations (AstroBlob API).
The plugin downloads the list of associations from https://api-club.astroblob.com/api/public/clubs. It needs this list to fill the “Association” menu and to find the address your banners link to.

• When: only on the Settings > AstroBlob admin page, and only when the list is not cached. The list is cached for 12 hours. The “Refresh list” button downloads it again. Visitors to your site never trigger this request, because banners are built from your saved settings.
• How: your WordPress server makes a plain GET request.
• What is sent: no personal data and no data about your site or its visitors. Only what any HTTP request carries: your server’s IP address and a User-Agent header with the plugin version.

2. Gallery images (AstroBlob API).
To show a gallery, your WordPress server downloads the list of images from https://api-club.astroblob.com/api/public/clubs/<your-association>/gallery, and then each image (a small and a medium JPEG) from the same server. The images are stored in wp-content/uploads/astroblob-gallery/ and your pages show these local copies.

• When: only on sites that show a gallery. The list is cached for one hour and refreshed in the background by WP-Cron. The images are downloaded once. The first time a gallery is shown, the list and its images are downloaded while that page is built.
• Visitors’ browsers never connect to AstroBlob to show the gallery. They load the images from your site.
• What is sent: no personal data and no data about your site or its visitors, as for the list of associations.
• What is received: the image title, target, capture date, telescope and observatory (name and country), and the author’s AstroBlob username only if the author allowed it. Images are listed only when their authors explicitly allowed their association to show them on its website. When an author withdraws that permission, the image is deleted from your site at the next hourly refresh.

3. Banner and gallery links.
When a visitor clicks a banner, or the “See more on AstroBlob” or “Join AstroBlob” button of a gallery, their browser goes to your association’s page on AstroBlob (for example https://your-association.astroblob.com/go), or to https://www.club.astroblob.com/go. The link includes these UTM parameters:

• utm_source: your site’s domain name, for example example.org
• utm_medium: wp-plugin
• utm_campaign: the campaign you set, banner by default
• utm_content: the banner format, or gallery-<format> for galleries

AstroBlob uses them to count how many visitors and sign-ups each site sends. Nothing is sent until a visitor clicks.

The plugin sets no cookies and does no tracking on your WordPress site. Banners and galleries load only images, a stylesheet and (for galleries) a small script from your own site.

• AstroBlob website: https://www.astroblob.com/es
• AstroBlob terms of use: https://www.club.astroblob.com/terms
• AstroBlob privacy policy: https://www.astroblob.com/en/astroblob-club/privacy-policy