Mar
30
Posted (Van Santos) in Site News on March-30-2009

I really enjoyed my past them – fracticles – but I started to run into issues with the theme and plugins The whole point to have a plugin on your site is so it can improve some aspect of the user experience… so, when I cannot use the plugins of my choosing, time to look elsewhere.

At the suggestion of Gianna, I needed to install a “subscription to this post” feature.  A feature that didn’t want to work in the last template. 

Now that we’ve moved on to the Bella theme, it looks as if my issuse are now resolved.  I you run into any problems, please let me know.



 
Jan
05
Posted (Van Santos) in Blogging Tools on January-5-2009

One thing bloggers and developers want to know is how traffic flows through their site and there could be for a number of reasons for wanting such information.  Is a  new design is working as intended?  Are headlines written in such a way that they illicit interest for your readers?  Why do people “bounce” away from the site?  These are all potential things a blogger would want to know about their site.

Some web stats programs have the ability to provide this information on a limited basis, but very view options are available to bloggers that show the exact path – especially for Wordpress users – so here is one for the Wordpress Community to investigate:  clickstats

clikStats is a plugin that automatically detects the current links within each post and compiles the who,what and when data (of each click) and provides an overview to the publish through his or her dashboard.

A sweet tool for anyone who wants to understand what is/isn’t working on their blog.



 
Dec
28
Posted (Van Santos) in Blogging Tools on December-28-2008

Time for another batch of potentially useful Wordpress plugins that are new to the community.  I am currently testing the following items, and have had no major issues thus far, but I cannot yet fully state they are 100% stable.

That out of the way, let’s get to it.

Phpinclude

If you are a PHP developer, I’m guessing you have had the urge to execute code in Wordpress at one point or another.  You can user an iFrame and call your PHP code but that can get a bit… well, it can be a pain to do so over and over.  While other plugins have attempted to execute PHP in the past, they never seemed to work properly – not that they were bad – they just never work right all of the time.  

Enter phpinclude.  

Thus far the plugin has performed flawlessly, and I may finally be able to successfully include PHP into the blog.

WP Post Styling 

This is a very interesting concept, one that I was interested in doing myself, but Joe Dolson got there before I did.  This plugin allows users to add custom styles to be applied to specific pages or posts.  Sweet idea and good execution.

Check them out, give them a try and thank the creators for their efforts.



 
Dec
23
Posted (Van Santos) in Blogging Tools on December-23-2008

Wikinvest, an investment website run by “everyday” investors, has created a plugin for blogs that focus on financial information – the Wikinvest Stock Quotes Plugin.  

The plugin will search your post for keywords and suggest potential stock quotes you may want to include in your posts.  For those worried that the plugin will have a mind of its own, fear not, as the plugin does not include any information without your confirmation before the post goes live.

The one thing I do not care for is how the plugin will link back to the Wikinvest site in order to be “a resource of good quality and free content for your readers”  What they are really saying is the Plugin is a way for Wikinvest to create new sources of traffic.

It should would be nice if they had an option to turn that “feature” off.

Unfortunately I have no way of testing the plugin at this point.  When I try to download the file from Wikinvest I obtain an error. Makes me wonder what to expect of the service moving forward…



 
Dec
22
Posted (Van Santos) in Blogging Tools on December-22-2008

Quick question for StatsPress Reloaded users – do you find the plugin slows down/chews up CPU power if your log file get’s too large?

As the site contiunes to grow it seems the StatPress Reloaded plugin slows down significantly…