2007 February Archive at T. Longren

Monthly Archive for February, 2007

I’ve Been Reinvigorated

Published

on February 28, 2007

in Internet, Noteworthy, Personal and WordPress

. 1 Comment

Reinvigorate is really nice. It’s a website statistics package, similar to Google Anlaytics and Mint. On the Reinvigorate home page, the service is described as “Measurement, performance, and regression analysis tools for evolving websites and blogs of all sizes”, sweet. Anyway, I signed up for the private beta a long time ago and finally received an invitation a few days ago.

Dougal Campbell has blogged about reinvigorate a couple times, check his posts out for some more background information on Reinvigorate.

Reinvigorate gives a really unique view of your website or blog, especially when it comes to tracking individual users. They also have a neat feature called “Name Tags”. Name Tags associate information on your website or blog (names, email addresses, etc) with the session id assigned by Reinvigorate. For example, this lets me track commenters based on the name they use when commenting. If someone comments, the name they used in the comment will show up in Reinvigorate. This makes it easy to see all the pages the commentor visited and how much time they spent on each page. Reinvigorate describes Name Tags as follows:

Name Tags are an easy way to identify exactly who your visitors are.

It works by associating information your site manages (username, e-mail, account ID, etc..) with the session ID Reinvigorate uses to track visitors on your site/blog.

It’s extremely simple to setup, even if your site uses its own proprietary user account system. 1-2 extra lines of code and we take care of the rest.

Name Tags are extremely simple to make use of if you use WordPress. Reinvigorate has a plugin for WordPress that makes using Name Tags a breeze. The plugin also prevents you from having to manually add the tracking code to your blog. You can turn on Name Tags right from the plugin options page. Just activate the plugin, enter your tracking id, turn Name Tags on or off, and you’re set.

I’m really happy with Reinvigorate after using it for only two days. It’s exciting to know it’s still in beta, so hopefully they’ll continue to add features and more options. One thing I would really like is the ability to select a date range to view data for. Especially for the search terms, I want to see my top search terms over certain periods of time. Same goes for popular pages too.

If you haven’t already, go sign up for the beta. You may have to wait a while for an invitation, but it’s worth the wait. I can’t wait to see what the developers have planned for Reinvigorate in the future.

Popularity: 11% [?]

WordPress and Prototype

Published

Tyler

on February 19, 2007

in Internet, Noteworthy, PHP, Personal and WordPress

. 1 Comment

Lots of people have searching about wordpress and prototype.js and have been lading at my post about Alex King’s Share This plugin and prototype.js. At the time I made that post, I wasn’t aware of the wp_enueque_script() function in WordPress 2.1.

Making use of wp_enqueue_script will ensure that your script is only loaded once. It’s really handy, hopefully everyone that uses prototype in their theme or plugin will start using wp_enqueue_script to load the prototype.js file. To load prototype, you’d use wp_enqueue_script like so:

<?php wp_enqueue_script('prototype'); ?>

Prototype isn’t the only script that can be loaded with wp_enqueue_script. Take a look in wp-includes/script-loader.php to see some of the other scripts that wp_enqueue_script can load by default.

Popularity: 12% [?]

Good Bye Spam Karma 2. Hello Akismet.

Published

Tyler

on February 10, 2007

in Internet, Personal and WordPress

. 17 Comments

Spam Karma 2 has served my well over the last year or two. As you can see from the image, SK2 stopped 76,264 pieces of comment spam from being published. Before Akismet was around, Spam Karma 2 was the plugin most people went to for spam protection.

Since Spam Karma 2 hasn’t been showing any signs of life lately, I’ve decided to ditch it in favor of Akismet. I know for a fact Akismet is being actively developed. Also, I know for a fact that Akismet fully supports WordPress 2.1. I’m pretty sure SK2 isn’t fully WordPress 2.1 compatible. I’m not sure though, I say that because I thought I read of some WordPress 2.1 users having lots of problems with SK2. I could be way off though, I can’t find whatever it was I thought I was reading now.

Anyway, Akismet is now protecting this blog from comment spam. I’m not anticipating any problems, but who knows. If you have problems posting comments please get in touch with me via the contact form.

Popularity: 13% [?]

WordPress Plugin: Thumbnail Viewer 1.1

Published

Tyler

on February 3, 2007

in Internet, Noteworthy, PHP, Personal and WordPress

. 54 Comments

1.1 is now old, go get the newest.

I’ve released version 1.1 of my Thumbnail Viewer plugin, which still needs an official homepage. This release was prompted by a problem with showing the quicktag when authoring a new post or page. The quicktag wasn’t showing on WordPress 2.1 installations. So, as a result, WordPress 2.0.x is no longer supported by the Thumbnail Viewer plugin. If you want to use this plugin you’ll need WordPress 2.1 or later. Really, the plugin should still work with WordPress 2.0.x, however the quicktag won’t be available when writing a new post.

The issues in Internet Explorer 7 I spoke about earlier haven’t been resolved, quite. I’d say the plugin works fine in 98% or more of all Internet Explorer 7 installations. I’ve only had problems on one installation of IE7. I’m pretty sure this problem isn’t even directly related to this plugin. I say that because the demo page for the code this plugin is based on won’t work either in that same IE7 install. So, it’s apparently a problem in the javascript this plugin is based on. I guess as of right now, I’m considering the div display problem in IE7 to be out of my control.

Anyway, click the images below for a demo.

The above example was achieved with the following HTML:

<a href="http://www.longren.org/images/corn.jpg" rel="thumbnail" title="Some Corn"><img src="http://www.longren.org/images/cornThumbnail.jpg" width="129" height="96" alt="Some Corn" /></a>
<a href="http://www.longren.org/images/crackerJacks.jpg" rel="thumbnail" title="Some Cracker Jacks!"><img src="http://www.longren.org/images/crackerJacksThumbnail.jpg" width="98" height="123" alt="Some Cracker Jacks" /></a>
<a href="http://www.longren.org/images/peas.jpg" rel="thumbnail" title="Some Peas In A Pod"><img src="http://www.longren.org/images/peasThumbnail.jpg" width="145" height="96" alt="Some Peas" /></a>

1.1 is now old, go get the newest.

Installation

Extract wp-thumbnailviewer folder from .zip to wp-contents/plugins/.
Go to Plugins in WordPress dashboard and activate Thumbnail Viewer.
That’s it! Write a new post to use the quicktag button or simply add rel=thumbnail to any link tag.

Upgrading

Simply overwrite everything in wp-contents/plugins/wp-thumbnailviewer/ with everything in the wp-thumbnailviewer folder from the zip file.
That’s it! You should now be using the latest Thumbnail Viewer WordPress plugin.

Popularity: 28% [?]

Unwakeable Status: Version Bump

Published

Tyler

on February 3, 2007

in Internet, PHP, Personal, Unwakeable and WordPress

. 4 Comments

Just a quick heads up on what’s been going on with Unwakeable lately. On the top of my priority list is livesearch. Livesearch doesn’t work in Internet Explorer when certain plugins are in use, such as Share This from Alex King. This is caused by multiple prototype.js files being loaded.

The next version of Unwakeable will be 2.0. I’ve been saying 1.3 would be the next version but have since decided to make the bump up to 2.x. I chose to do this because I’m dropping support for WordPress 2.0.x and focusing on supporting WordPress 2.1 fully.

Since Unwakeable 2.0 is a couple weeks out still, this will hopefully give everyone enough time to upgrade to WordPress 2.1. There shouldn’t be anything holding you back from upgrading at this point. As of right now, I’m taking out all the old WordPress 2.0.x functions and replacing them with the new functions found in WordPress 2.1. I really don’t want to try to support both versions of WordPress. Doing so could cause pages to load slowly due to all the checking I’d have to do for existing functions. So, as of right now, Unwakeable 2.0 will be WordPress 2.1 only!!

Also slated for Unwakeable 2.0 is additional support for more plugins. Unwakeable 2.0 will have support for the following plugins, in addition to those already supported:

I’ve retooled the various post styles that were introduced in Unwakeable 1.1. I’ve slimmed them down quite a bit and have included icons from Dropline Neu by Silvestre Herrera.

Also, I should have some additional options for Unwakeable. One additional option will be the number of related posts to show on the sidebar, as well as the number of recent posts to show on the sidebar. Also, I’d like to include an option to specify weather or not to use a fixed width , which is pixel based, or variable width, which is percentage based. This will give greater flexibility to bloggers who post large images frequently. I haven’t looked into how feasable this will be to do yet. Provided it’s not too difficult, this feature should be included in Unwakeable 2.0.

I’m still planning support for user defined color schemes in the options panel, although not in time for Unwakeable 2.0. I’m not quite sure how to go about displaying all these options in an efficient manner. It may be easier for me to just allow users to create custom style sheets that apply only to colors. Not really sure as of right now how I should exactly go about this. This how-to from Thomas looks pretty good, although little of it probably relates to WordPress 2.1.

So, there you have it. I’m really looking forward to releasing Unwakeable 2.0, it’s gonna be the best release yet. Again, I’d like to thank everyone who uses Unwakeable. Your kind words and feedback make every bit of time I put into Unwakeable very much worth it. Thank you all for your support. And as always, let me know if there’s any features you’d like to see or if you’d like support for a certain plugin.

Popularity: 13% [?]

Mint 2.0 Bird Feeder and WordPress

Published

Tyler

on February 3, 2007

in Internet and Personal

. 0 Comments

Shaun Inman has released version 2.0 of Mint, my favorite website analytics software. Go over to the Mint website and have a look at what’s new in version 2.0.

If you’re a Mint 1.x user, you’ll have to pay another $19 to make the upgrade to 2.0. I purchased the upgrade for version 2.0 earlier this week and finally got around to actually upgrading earlier today. The $19 is well worth the upgrade, Mint 2.0 brings many nice new features, like the Bird Feeder pepper for example:

Your RSS and Atom feeds attract all kinds of colorful wildlife, Bird Feeder is a window onto that activity. It highlights subscription trends across multiple Feeds and clicks on individual Seeds. What’s a seed? That’s bird-ese for an article or link within a feed.

Upgrading from Mint 1 was pretty painless, the only thing I’ve had issues with is the Bird Feeder pepper. There seems to be quite a bit of confusion about installing the Bird Feeder pepper. I haven’t really finished installing the Bird Feeder pepper, I don’t want to risk breaking my feeds. I’ve been watching this thread over at the Mint forums for tips. Recently, a forum user linked to a post by Kristin Pishdadi, who has posted a how-to for getting Bird Feeder working with WordPress 2. She spells out step by step what needs to be done to get Bird Feeder working with your WordPress feeds. Looks pretty straight forward, I wonder if it works the same if the WordPress Feedburner plugin is being used. I need to read up some on how exactly that Feedburner plugin works first I guess.

The wp-mint plugin for WordPress should still work fine with Mint 2.0. All the javascript in Mint 2.0 is included in exactly the same fashion it was in Mint 1.x, so that plugin should still work 100%.

So, if you’re having trouble getting the Bird Feeder pepper working with WordPress, go check out Kristin’s post, it’ll probably take care of your problems. It’s a lot more clear about installation than the readme that’s included with the Bird Feeder pepper. The Mint forums are an excellent resource for support issues of all types, check them out if you have problems outside the scope of Kristin’s post.

Popularity: 10% [?]