Yes, definitely. The hellodolly plugin “hooks” into the administration menu functions, whereas you are trying instead to “hook” into the public version of the site. Therefore, you have to change the hooks that you’re registering your functions to do that on the public site (not the admin site).
See this page: http://codex.wordpress.org/Plugin_API/Action_Reference
add_action('admin_footer', 'hello_dolly');
might become:
add_action('wp_footer', 'hello_dolly');
add_action('admin_head', 'dolly_css');
might become:
add_action('wp_head', 'dolly_css');
NOTES/DISCLAIMER: I didn’t test this code, but hopefully you get the point about why your approach is not working…
hey thanks! it works now. we had that second part right, but changing the ‘admin_notice’ to ‘wp_footer’ did the trick. coolness.