User:EugeneKay/Zig
Since folk have been asking, I've decided to share with you what the hell is going on in my sig, and how in the hell do I include the timestamp in it.
It's rather simple, really. There's only two pieces of wiki-magic happening. If you look at it, you'll see a couple of confusing things. The first section is a giant <includeonly> section, which is my sig proper. The rest is just this texty thing here.
Now, to understand what happens, you need to break up my fancy <span> tags, which are what make the formatting all black and cool and multicolored texty stuff. I'm not going to decipher those, they puzzle even me when I go to change my colours, and I'm lazy. Here is what the sig-code looks like without the fancy bits:
[[User:EugeneKay|EugeneKay]] [[Vandalism|wuz]] [[Special:Random|here]] [[User talk:EugeneKay/Chat|(whine]] [[User talk:EugeneKay/Thanks|thank)]] {{if#{{{1|}}}|{{{1}}}}}
EugeneKay wuz here (whine thank)
Notice that whole {{if}} block at the end? It doesn't appear to do anything to the output of the sig at first glance. But, this is where the magic happens! First, the thing looks for a variable, named {{{1}}}(which is the first variable passed in an include, incidentally), and outputs that variable. If {{{1}}} does not exist, it just skips the whole damned thing. In this example, {{{1}}} is undefined, so it skips it.
I have two ways of calling my sig. The first will display the timestamp(or anything at all, really), and the second will skip it.
{{User:EugeneKay/Zig|~~~~~~}}
{{User:EugeneKay/Zig}}
EugeneKay wuz here (whine thank) 22:58, 14 November 2007 (UTC)
EugeneKay wuz here (whine thank)
This is where the second bit of magic comes in-the special timestamp code, ~~~~~(five tilde's). When you click the "save" button, all instances of those five tilde's is replaced with a timestamp. Easy, no?
Update: I've made my sig even more magical. I now call it using only ~~~. This is possible through a yet more wiki-magic. I have a page, entitled User:EugeneKay/Zig2. All it does is include my sig. In my preferences, I have my "nickname" set to this long convuluted piece of crap.
{{SUBST:User:EugeneKay/Zig2|{{subst:CURRENTTIME}}, {{subst:CURRENTDAYNAME}} {{subst:CURRENTDAY2}} {{subst:CURRENTMONTHNAME}} {{subst:CURRENTYEAR}}}}
I shit you not. It actually works, somehow. It took a bunch of fiddling to get just right. But now I only need to type three tilde's, and I have a properly timestamped sig. Nice, eh? Ask me if you want help getting something similar to this mess set up. I feel it may break Wikia at some point in the future, and will live up to Chuck Norris. God bless his VFH.
This should explain all the magical bits that happen in my sig. Because I am a heartless bastard, I'm not going to give you EZ-Steal code, other than what I've already posted. Please grab that and modify it for your own devious purposes. I ask that you try to think of an original color scheme, and not steal mine outright.
If you need any further help, click on the "Chat" link in my sig.
And damn the shitty formatting.
This has been a EugeneKay production.