Tag Archive for 'web'

Mint 2.0 Bird Feeder and WordPress

Published
by
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: 9% [?]

Performancing For Firefox 1.3

Published
by
Tyler
on August 9, 2006
in Internet, Open Source and Personal
. 0 Comments

Performancing For Firefox 1.3 has been released. Lots and lots of changes are included in this release. There’s now support for themes and addons. The performancing team has also open sourced Performancing For Firefox, which means anyone can get the source code and modify it as they please.

Some of the new features are listed below:

I’m writing this post with this new version of Performancing. So far nothing unusual. The addons and themes API additions are sweet, hopefully some worthy developers will hack together some neat addons. I’m excited about this new version, it’s opened a lot more doors for Performancing.

Popularity: 4% [?]

WordPress 2.0 Final is Here

Published
by
Tyler
on December 26, 2005
in Internet, Open Source and Personal
. 2 Comments

I just did an update on my local WordPress subversion trunk and noticed the version had been updated to 2.0. No more release candidate, this is the final 2.0 WordPress release. Not many changes between 2.0-Final and RC3. I think there were maybe a total of 15 files that had any changes to them, if that many.

The WordPress.org site is down for the time being, displaying a message:

Switching servers, please check back in about a half hour. Thanks! - Matt

Probably getting ready to announce WordPress 2.0 on the site. Congratulations to the WordPress team on another fine release.

Popularity: 4% [?]

WordPress 2.0-RC3

Published
by
Tyler
on December 20, 2005
in Internet, Open Source and Personal
. 0 Comments

So, I didn’t post for WordPress 2.0-RC2, although there was a far greater number of changes in RC2 than there is in RC3. But, RC2 is history now, so screw it. Sounds like this could be the final release candidate before WordPress 2.0 is officially out of beta and ready for “production” use.

The next release of WordPress is drawing near. Please help us shake out any last remaining bugs by downloading and testing the 2.0 Release Candidate. If all goes well, the Release Candidate will become 2.0 final. We’re almost there. Download, test, and head over to the Beta Forum to let us know if the Release Candidate is ready for prime time.


I’ve got release candidate 3 running here right now, no problems at all. On a related note, Spam Karma 2.0 informed me of 2.1 being in beta. Can’t seem to find a link to it now though.

Popularity: 5% [?]

WordPress 2.0-RC1

Published
by
Tyler
on November 28, 2005
in Internet, Linux, Open Source and Personal
. 5 Comments

WordPress 2.0 Release Candidate 1 is here. I don’t have any official links or anything, I haven’t even seen a mention of it on the mailing list. We’ve had one WordPress 2.0 test release each week for the last three weeks now. I like it. Only way I know of to grab it is via subversion.

I’ve noticed something weird in 2.0 Beta 2 though. It may have been there in Beta 1 also, may still be in RC1, who knows. None of my tags show up on Technorati or anywhere. And I also noticed there’s no data in the “wp_postmeta” table relating to the freshly published post, like there should be. So, after publishing the post, I’m taken back to the “write post” page. Only, the “write post” page doesn’t finish loading for a couple minutes sometimes. Previously, I had just navigated away from the loading page without giving it a second thought. I decided to wait for it to finish tonight. After loading, all the tags I had set for that post were in their proper places in the “wp_postmeta” table.

There were some pretty odd circumstances with that post though. For one, I set the posts date/time to about 3 minutes out from where I currently was. After I published the article, it took about 3 minutes to show up here. That behavior is totally expected though. WordPress is good like that.

Also, there were some values in “wp_postmeta” I had never seen before. I didn’t write em down, if I seem it again soon I’ll make a note. All I know is the “meta_key” value was set to something like “_ping_me” or something similar to that. After the post had published, the unknown “meta_key” value had been deleted and my tags were in their proper place in that table.

Now, I don’t know if this behavior is always there when post-dating a post, but it seemed like the ping services (in “wp_options” table) were actually being pinged while the “write post” page was loading right after I had published.

Who knows, maybe it’s all coincidence. Time will tell. Oh, and before I forget, PHP 5.1.0 broke WordPress and lots of stuff for me, and lots of others as well. Tried upgrading to PHP 5.1.1 today, same broken shit. Pages load blank the first time around, second time they load perfectly. I’m sticking with 5.0.x for a while. Soon to be moving to MySQL 5. I’m pretty sure I don’t have to pay for MySQL 5, I gotta research that a little first. I assume I can because the .tar.bz2 source is where it should be on dev.mysql.com.

OK, time to upgrade to WordPress 2.0 Release Candidate 1 before bed. I gotta say though, I love the new dashboard. It’s got a Web 2.0 feel to it, but nobody knows what Web 2.0 is. So, I’m gonna take a chance and say “I really dig the new half Web 2.0 WordPress.”

UPDATE: OK, all updated to 2.0-RC1 now. You should ignore everything above this update pretty much. The problem I spoke about earlier isn’t related to WordPress, don’t hold me to that though. I did some more testing before upgrading to 2.0-RC1. I think it’s some odd plugin functionality. I’ve been using Jerome’s Keywords for tagging. Every time I edit a post the tags get wiped. I know that’s the general problem. I don’t know if it’s caused by the plugin or if it’s WordPress wiping out all the “custom fields”. Jerome’s Keywords stores its tag data in those “custom fields”, inside the “wp_postmeta” table.

You can get WordPress 2.0-RC1 in the nightly builds directory on the wordpress.org server.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Mint: Fresh Visitor Tracking

Published
by
Tyler
on October 27, 2005
in Internet and Personal
. 4 Comments

Mint is wonderful. It has been so far at least. Mint is a fairly new website stats package written by the author of ShortStat, Shaun Inman.

Introducing Mint: The web is listening to what you have to say. Admiring your design. Talking about your product. Mint helps you identify where the most interest is being generated and over what.

Mint provides a fresh look at your site. It is concise, flexible and timely. And to sweeten the deal, this delicious little bundle of PHP, MySQL, and JavaScript joy is referrer-spam-proof.

I’ve only been using Mint for a few hours, but I’ve been looking at it for the last week or so. After wp-shortstat started causing really slow page loads, I wasn’t really using anything to log stats. I do use a couple other stats related WordPress plugins, but nothing that shows recent referers or client information in a pleasant way.

Typically, I wouldn’t buy a piece of software like this. There’s gotta be a couple thousand different web stats applications that are free. A large majority of those free apps though are either no longer being developed or the developers don’t know what they’re doing. Had Mint been more than $30/site, I wouldn’t be using it. I suspect Shaun will soon drop the price to $20 or $25. I’ve seen various people write that the cost of Mint is a little too high. I don’t know how many Mint users there are, but I’d think a lot more people would purchase if it were priced at $20. I had read enough about Mint though, that’s why I had no problem shelling out $30.

One of the best things about Mint is Pepper. Pepper is a plugin API that is supposed to make creating plugins very easy. Peppermint Tea features a variety of third party peppers (plugins), among other things, for Mint. One pepper I’m looking forward to trying out is Fresh View. Fresh View uses SVG images to help visualize Mint stats, unfortunately it’s only available for the development version of Mint. I believe it’s one of the few Peppers that work with Mint 1.2+, which is still the development version.

Some of the best currently available peppers can be found in a post Paul Stamatiou made at his blog.

A major motivator in my decision to purchase Mint was the ease in which it can be integrated with WordPress. The WP-Mint WordPress plugin does away with the need to add the tracking javascript to theme header files. So, you can switch themes in WordPress as much as you like without having to add the Mint tracking code to the header file of each theme. The Mint support forum has detailed instructions for setting Mint up to track your WordPress install.

All in all I’m very happy with Mint. I’ll post some screenshots within the next few days. If you’re interested, Adam at shibbyonline has a pretty all-inclusive post about Mint, from purchase to installing Peppers.

Linked at Basil’s Blog, Outside The Beltway, and Mudville Gazette.

Popularity: 9% [?]

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