Place of Stuff

Just a quick post.  Pretty much my favourite plugin here has been Commentluv by Andy Bailey.  Unfortunately, enabling IntenseDebate meant that Commentluv stopped working.  However, our favourite programmer/purveyor of fine food has written a Commentluv plugin for IntenseDebate.  Cool, eh?

So we get threaded comments, single sign and Commentluv all in one place.  If you wish to take advantage, there is an extra field under the comment box for you to put in your site URL.

Enjoy.

Just noticed that the latest WordPress.org update has been out since Thursday.  This time round the update does the following:

• Certain themes were calling get_categories() in such a way that it would fail in 2.8. 2.8.1 works around this so these themes won’t have to change.
• Dashboard memory usage is reduced.  Some people were running out of memory when loading the dashboard, resulting in an incomplete page.
• The automatic upgrade no longer accidentally deletes files when cleaning up from a failed upgrade.
• A problem where the rich text editor wasn’t being loaded due to compression issues has been worked around.
• Extra security has been put in place to better protect you from plugins that do not do explicit permission checks.
• Translation of role names fixed.
• wp_page_menu() defaults to sorting by the user specified menu order rather than the page title.
• Upload error messages are now correctly reported.
• Autosave error experienced by some IE users is fixed.
• Styling glitch in the plugin editor fixed.
• SSH2 filesystem requirements updated.
• Switched back to curl as the default transport.
• Updated the translation library to avoid a problem with mbstring.func_overload.
• Stricter inline style sanitization.
• Stricter menu security.
• Disabled code highlighting due to browser incompatibilities.
• RTL layout fixes.

If you’re into that sort of thing, you can read all about the changes between 2.8 and 2.8.1 here, and more details are here.  I upgraded using the auto-upgrade feature in the dashboard and it took under a minute.

As a fan of threaded comments, I decided to try out a new plugin – IntenseDebate.  This plugin allows for threaded comments, reply by email, commenter profiles and reputation points (though I may need to be sold on the value of this last one).  As with all WordPress plugins, the install is a matter of unzipping the file to your plugin folder and then activating it in the plugin section of the dashboard.

The plugin supports WordPress (duh!), Blogger, TypePad and Tmblr with more to come.

UPDATE – I have disabled the plugin.  Indexing the comments was taking too long, Commentluv and KeywordLuv were inactive and it was too much trouble.  This is not to say that there is anything wrong with the plugin – if I had started with IntenseDebate from the beginning, there would not have been any issues, but the wait was just too great.  Don’t let me put you off it – if I were to start a second blog, I would definitely install it.

Anyone who has commented on any of my posts will be aware that I have the CommentLuv plugin enabled on this site.  And lots of thanks to RT Cunningham of Untwisted Vortex for putting me onto this plugin.  You could do a lot worse than follow his advice on building SEO for your site.

For the uninitiated, how does CommentLuv work?  Well, I’m glad you asked.  By enabling CommentLuv on your blog, the plugin uses the feedreader associated with your commenter’s blog to list their last post.  So, by commenting on someone else’s post, you get to have your own post linked to.  No extra effort and no trouble.  In fact, if a lot of us use it, we will all end up with a nice little legitimate (very important) backlink – and we all do it for each other.  It’s probably not that clear, so here’s a picture to illustrate (click the pic for larger):

An example of CommentLuv

Just above the moderation buttons (of which, more later), we can see a link to RT’s last post at the time he wrote that comment.  The most current post of the commenter will be listed.  So if you post once a day, and comment here once a day, every comment will link to the current comment for that day.  For very little effort, your post has gained a backlink.

Why is this a good thing?  Well, for one, you don’t have to mail me to request I backlink to you (hint: unless your blog is really cool or I visit it regularly, I’ll probably not do it) and if you see how many different people leave posts on this site, you’ll see what a timesaver it is for me!  Another plus is that instead of just getting a link to your main site, you get a link to a particular post.  So you can focus your link – if I write a post about the UK government, for example, and you have a post about the government you have gained a focused backlink that is relevant.  Since, I hope, you were going to post here anyway, a free backlink is a good thing right?  Also, unless your post looks like automated spam, I won’t remove it – you don’t need to hide your link, I’m letting you leave it.

For blog authors, those moderator buttons (see, I told you I’d get back to it) save you a little effort – rather than having to go through your dashboard to moderate comments, under each comment in the post are a set of handy buttons to allow you to edit, delete, moderate (doesn’t delete, just moves it to the moderation queue) or mark as spam any comment.

This plugin is now at version 2.1 – if you haven’t already, update your version, there are new features coming up and you’ll need to register to see all of them.

I have long been curious about how people find my site and what they do when they get here. There are a number of plugins you can install for WordPress, but there isn’t (as far as I know) one tool which shows everything. And now there is.

Woopra is an application which analyses your site traffic and can bring up a number of facts about who they are and what they do. Signing up is free – you sign up, submit your site(s) and await notification. At this time of writing, it can take around 7 days but I believe they are working on ways to speed this up. Once you have signed up, download the WordPress plugin, install the app (with a few extra steps for Ubuntu users!) and watch the graphs fill up.

Woopra is in beta at the moment, but I must say that it’s one of the most polished beta apps I have used. For example, on starting up you are presented with the dashboard (click for bigger):

Just on that one page, you can see how visitors find their way to your site (where they land and leave), which searches they do to get there, which referrers pass you the traffic and numbers of visitors by country. There’s also a little stock ticker at the bottom of the page which gives info on your numbers and tells you whether they are up, down or static.

The “Live” page gives live information on your visitors. For example:

Visitor number 304 lives in the US (in the Chicago area) and is a Mac user browsing with Safari. They are reading the Amarok Installation page and browsing at a resolution of 1600×1200 – useful to see if you are interested in making your site readable at various resolutions. I have hidden the IP address of this user.

I won’t bore you by showing screenshots of every page, but I hope you can see how detailed the information is and, by exporting to a .csv file you can analyse and manipulate the data to your heart’s content! You can view visitors by browser, by OS, a mix of the two and a variety of other mixtures. I have discovered that someone is using Windows 98 when they visit!!

This tool isn’t for everyone. If you have one or more sites that pull in revenue for you, this tool will be of great help. If, like me, you just like trying things out an are nosy it’s also a good tool

For one thing, the number one search for this site is “lesbians” – frustrated porn viewers ar emy greatest source of traffic.

Being tech-savvy, smart and (statistically speaking) a good looking reader of this site, you will have no doubt heard of Open ID. Open ID was created to allow you to have just one ID which can beused on multiple websites meaning that you don’t need to remember lots of different user names and passwords. In the words of the site:

OpenID eliminates the need for multiple usernames across different websites, simplifying your online experience.

You get to choose the OpenID Provider that best meets your needs and most importantly that you trust. At the same time, your OpenID can stay with you, no matter which Provider you move to. And best of all, the OpenID technology is not proprietary and is completely free.

For businesses, this means a lower cost of password and account management, while drawing new web traffic. OpenID lowers user frustration by letting users have control of their login.

For geeks, OpenID is an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity. OpenID takes advantage of already existing internet technology (URI, HTTP, SSL, Diffie-Hellman) and realizes that people are already creating identities for themselves whether it be at their blog, photostream, profile page, etc. With OpenID you can easily transform one of these existing URIs into an account which can be used at sites which support OpenID logins.

OpenID is still in the adoption phase and is becoming more and more popular, as large organizations like AOL, Microsoft, Sun, Novell, etc. begin to accept and provide OpenIDs. Today it is estimated that there are over 160-million OpenID enabled URIs with nearly ten-thousand sites supporting OpenID logins.

So how does a single sign on affect us here and now? Well, if you browse down to the comments section (bottom of the page), just as you go to put in a witty, insightful comment you’ll see a small addition to the “website” field:

Put your Open ID into it (for example, <user ID>.pip.verisignlabs.com) and submit your comment. If you don’t have one and really want one, go to the information page How Do I Get One? and sign up with a provider of your choice. To make life even easier, once you have an Open ID and if you go via Verisign, get the Verisign Seatbelt Firefox Plugin which will autosign you in to the relevant enabled websites.