plugins: reinvigorate your stats

Posted on May 8, 2007
Filed Under plugins, statistics | 2 Comments

I’m a total stats geek. I love them. Currently I use a combination of Google analytics, Feedburner, 103bees.com and the popularity contest plugin.

I’ve just started using a fifth package, reinvigorate, which adds another clever layer of detail to the stats world, and it makes life VERY easy for wordpress bloggers by providing a simple plugin which handles all the in page code generation for you. Coming straight from reinvigorate should hopefully mean this plugin gets updated regularly, keeping your stats in top condition.

preview.png

The interesting thing reinvigorate promises to do is give more information on individual visitors to your site, highlighting repeat visits, entry points, etc… Most stats are all about aggregate info, so this should be interesting. I’ll post an update in a few days as I see the stats rank up, and get a feel for how useful they are, so far it’s looking pretty addictive with a clean interface.

You need an invite to the beta program to sign up currently, request one here. I’ll repost when they go public beta.

Popularity: 6% [?]

girly wordpress themes

Posted on May 8, 2007
Filed Under themes, wishlist | 5 Comments

Following this post I had a chat with Grace from paper wings and started thinking about the girlier side of wordpress. We’re not talking female here, we’re talking GIRLY. Pink, cutesy, ribbons and kittens GIRLY. Still confused… this might help:

welcome.gif

NOW you get it. Okay, lets get started with a few places to find girly themes, there are quite a few out there.

Candii at LuvSkyes has a couple of themes which tick the boxes for kittens, pink and ribbons. This ‘pink kupy‘ theme misses out on kittens and hearts but has some fluffy clouds and little stars… and it’s PINK. I’ve already covered sakura, but it deserves another mention. Less pink, but easily modded into a pink-fest frozen garden is a great starting point. Translucency is quite girly, especially in purple. Jemjabella has a number of themesof varying girlyness. One of them has convinced me that strawberries are girlier than peaches. I was SURE peaches were the girliest fruit!. Sweet touch is pretty girly, without being too pretty, if that makes any sense.

A couple of final links from Grace “for people using the Custom Mood plugin helena.bucasio has some neat pixel emoticons that I use. They’re very cutesy/girly.”

If we’ve missed any themes comment below and I’ll add some links.

In part two we’ll look at girly functionality, with a close look at Grace’s idea for a ‘currently’ plugin…

Popularity: 12% [?]

plugins: Stock quotes galore

Posted on May 3, 2007
Filed Under plugins | 1 Comment

Stock quotes depress me. That said, anything financial has a habit of depressing me so I shouldn’t be biased against stocks. Even cash annoys me, why is it so dirty.

For those of you not depressed by stocks a pair of nice plugins from Andy @ Hillhome should make you happy. These are particularly useful if you run a financially oriented blog. Plugin one provides sidebar stock quotes, plugin two provides tooltips with stock charts. Both are presented as Beta, but seem to be pretty robust.

I love the very simple script used to deploy your quotes:

<?php get_stock_quote("NOVL,PFE,INTC"); ?>

An excellent extension to this plugin would be to allow subscribers to a WP blog to select their own batch of stocks to track, that would give an easy route to a low tech share club website based on WP.

Found at weblog tools.

Popularity: 5% [?]

plugins: list my wordpress plugins exists

Posted on May 1, 2007
Filed Under plugins, wishlist | 4 Comments

Excellent news folks, my wish for a plugin to list all plugins used on a WordPress blog has come true.

Vipers plugins used provides just this, a plugin to list on our public blog details of the plugins we use in a blog. Widespread use of this plugin would have two great benefits to the WP community.

Developer recognition
Firstly, it rewards successful plugin developers with much needed link love, making them easier to find, and helping them to buy the odd Google Ads funded beer as reward.

Blogger convenience
Secondly, the links make it easier for me to see which plugin a blog I admire uses, helping me to raise the standard of my own blog. This is the ultimate convenience for bloggers looking for new functionality.

Both of these factors should drive more extensive use of good plugins, and drive development of successful plugins. Raising the issue of link-love rears the spectre of sponsored links perhaps, but valid link-love makes the web go round, so I’m comfortable with it.

The developer has stated an intention to make the installation of the plugin more straightforward, which it will need to be to gain mass adoption - at the moment it requires a pretty detailed installation guide.

Quick installation
I’ve simplified the install somewhat, for one specific use, which works for me. Simply upload to your plugins folder as usual, activate, and add the following line to your sidebar to add an unordered list of your plugins used:

<?php $viperspluginsused = new viperspluginsused(); $viperspluginsused->output_list(); ?>

This doesn’t bring all the power of the plugin out, but it gets the core into your blog quickly and painlessly. My list:

You can see the live plugin generated list for this blog on the About page. I found the plugin via Marco Luthe.

Popularity: 8% [?]

Themes: CLI = cool

Posted on April 30, 2007
Filed Under themes | 7 Comments

Command Line Interfaces are just plain cool. GUIs are for wimps! This theme turns your blog into an old Commodore 64 running a CLI, user friendly it ain’t. If I need to explain why you’d want to use this, you don’t want to use this.

cli.jpg

If you are thinking, ‘yeah thats sweet, but the C64 was a bit rubbish’, this theme does the same trick for Unix. Joy. I’m working on a Sinclair Spectrum version, so if you know of one tell me and save me some time! [via boingboing]

Popularity: 7% [?]

plugins: MC Hammer Hello Dolly

Posted on April 25, 2007
Filed Under plugins, experiments | 3 Comments

Following my slightly pointless earlier post about modding Hello Dolly I’ve finally gotten around to completing the first of many (likely) mods.

touchthis.jpg

Thats right, MC Hammer, U Can’t Touch This (lyrics from metrolyrics). Sometimes a guy just needs to be cheered up in a non obvious way.

I really want to see what everyone else has done with this kind of simple mod, so post below or email / twitter me the details. Lets start a Hello Dolly mod bank! Suggestions too, although the mod takes 5 minutes to achieve.

Download the Touch This plugin here. touchthis.zip. (You know the drill, just unzip and drop the touchthis.php file into your plugins directory.)

Popularity: 6% [?]

speedlink: photoshop & technorati update

Posted on April 25, 2007
Filed Under design | Leave a Comment

2 unrelated topics in this post - way to live life on the edge of the blogging rules huh!.

For budding theme designers new (or new-ish) to photoshop this lifehacker article has some interesting links. I just wasted an hour playing with plugins. I feel the urge to change my template and add some texture.

And a small update to my stats post from last week, wordpressguy.com just broke into the technorati top 100,000. Hurrah. There are only 96,713 more popular blogs.

Popularity: 5% [?]

plugins: look after those commentators

Posted on April 23, 2007
Filed Under plugins | 3 Comments

Commentators / commenters / comment-givers. Whatever you call them, looking after them (you) is good for any blog. There are a few plugins which really help you do that, but in particular one that I’ve just stumbled across at this blog while hunting down WP news.

Almost everyone knows about the subscribe to comments plugin which allows your readers to be informed when you, or anyone, continues the thread they contribute to. I find this invaluable on other peoples blogs, so use it here on wordpressguy.com.

sub_stats_screenshot_3_clic.jpgTo extend the usefulness of this plugin, the subscriber stats plugin provides, well, stats.

About your subscribers.

Amazing huh!

I’ll be testing it out over the next couple of weeks and will report back.

Popularity: 4% [?]

pimp my hello dolly

Posted on April 22, 2007
Filed Under plugins, pimp my blog | 3 Comments

I stumbled across this post about an interesting Hello Dolly mod [UPDATE - link has mysteriously disappeared (thanks for pointing it out chris), I’ll find some more later tonight and repost!] this evening and it got me thinking, how many other Hello Dolly mods are there out there?

If you run one on your blog, built one, or just know of one drop a comment below. Lets build the definitive list!

Also, if you have any ideas for a mod comment below and we’ll build them.

Popularity: 6% [?]

speedlink: plugins vs upgrades

Posted on April 21, 2007
Filed Under plugins | 2 Comments

One of the only things that slows me down when a new WordPress upgrade comes along is the need to turn off all the plugins, install update, then enable all the plugins again. In case you missed in on your wp-admin, Geek ramblings informs us of some excellent progress on this front over at his blog. Basically, with WP2.2 you will get a button to disable all plugins at once. Nice! No excuse from now on!

Popularity: 3% [?]

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