Wizard's Blog

Polldaddy logo

Last October Automattic (makers of WordPress) bought Polldaddy, a company that provides embeddable poll and survey widgets.

I tried out the original version of the Polldaddy WordPress plugin, and to be honest it wasn’t great.  The original version mostly just showed you pages from the Polldaddy website in an iframe on your WordPress admin pages, and it was pretty buggy.  The poll I created back then to see which WordPress theme people liked doesn’t even show up in my account now.

In March they released a new version of the plugin that’s much better – it integrates properly with the WordPress admin pages.  They’ve also embraced and integrated Twitter – you can create a poll and easily post it to Twitter in one step.

The new version of the plugin is finally in a state where I would confidently use it, although the difference between free and paid accouts still exists – free accounts are only allowed 100 survey responses and a paid account costs $200 a year!  I realize they need to make money, but that’s a hell of a lot of money.

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A while ago I found out about a WordPress plugin called WP-Cumulus that shows your site’s tags, categories or both using a Flash movie that rotates them in 3D.

WP-Cumulus screenshot

WP-Cumulus adds on to WordPress as a sidebar widget, which means it ends up pretty small, and you lose a lot of the detail.

The upside is that the plugin looks very pretty – it spins in 3D and can be controlled by the mouse.

The downside is that normal tag clouds are just regular HTML hyperlinks so with WP-Cumulus you lose some navigability, especially from the point of view of a crawling searching engine.  You lose it completely if you don’t have Flash installed.  It also slows down your page loads a bit.

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I’ve been using the WP Super Cache plug-in on my blog for a while.  I’m quite happy with it, although I doubt my website gets enough traffic to really need it.

WP Super Cache does have one drawback – it only caches a page after it has been accessed the first time, so if a lot of pages are accessed just once (for example when a search engine crawls your website) you get no benefit from the caching.  This is understandable considering WP Super Cache was designed to help when a single page is accessed a lot of times (e.g. the digg effect).

I recently found out about DB Cache (I don’t remember where from), which is a similar plug-in in that it’s intended to speed up your website and reduce the load on the server.  However it works differently from WP Super Cache in that instead of caching pages it caches database queries.

This means that DB Cache provides less of an improvement when a single page gets a lot of hits, because PHP still runs for every hit – only the database queries are sped up.  In this case WP Super Cache would be faster because PHP only needs to run on the first hit, and from then on it’s serving static HTML.

The case where DB Cache provides more of an improvement over WP Super Cache is when lots of different pages get hits around the same time (e.g. when a search engine crawls your website).  In this case WP Super Cache never gets to serve static pages, so it doesn’t provide any improvement.  However because hits on different pages will use a lot of the same database queries, DB Cache will be able to speed this up.

I’m currently using both DB Cache and WP Super Cache at the same time, and they seem to co-exist without any problems.  This way I get the best of both worlds – either a page is already in WP Super Cache and a static page gets served, or the page is being accessed for the first time and so the database queries get cached by DB Cache.

Unlike most of the other plug-ins I use, the author of the DB Cache plug-in isn’t a native English speaker (he’s Ukrainian) so help and support seem to be more of a challenge than usual.

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gooseGrade logo

ReadWriteWeb recently did an article on gooseGrade, so I thought I’d try it out.

GooseGrade is a website that lets you suggest corrections for spelling errors, factual errors etc. on websites.  Your suggestions are then reviewed by the owner of the website and then either applied or discarded, depending on whether your suggestion was correct.

Apparently it works with pretty much any website just by inserting some HTML, but they also have plugins for popular blogging platforms like their WordPress plugin.  I’ve installed it here but I haven’t been able to get it working yet.

You can learn a bit more about it by watching this video:

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This post is about the social aspect of software development, not the development of social software – I realize the title is ambiguous.

A few days ago, I came across a project someone had done to automatically append a Google Analytics campaign identifier to URLs shortened using Cligs so that you can tell what clicks came from that shortened URL.  It seemed like a really useful idea, but from my point of view the execution was less than ideal – it used a php file I had to host and a bookmarklet.

The only URLs I shorten are blog posts, and I already use the WP to Twitter WordPress plugin to do that.  So I suggested it to the developer of the plugin on his website.  The next day he’d added the feature to his plugin.

I was shocked – I’m still used to the old, monolithic model of development where you get a new version every year or two, it’ll have whatever features the company decides, you have no say in the matter and you definitely have no contact with the developers.

I guess the accessibility of home computers has increased the number of smaller companies and individual developers, and the Internet has connected everyone together better to make this possible.  It’s a brave new world.

This is a test of the GeoPress plugin for WordPress:

INSERT_MAP

It’s a pretty cool plugin that lets you insert maps into your posts, as well as associating a post with a particular location.

The location information is also included in your feeds using GeoRSS.

Maps can be Google, Microsoft, OpenStreetMap, 3D Globe, or any major mapping provider by using the Mapstraction mapping library and it also adds KML for viewing in Google Earth.

The server move I mentioned previously has finally been completed.  So far everything seems to work except for some WordPress plugins - Disqus, Zemanta, WP SuperCache, XML Sitemap Generator and WP to Twitter.  Currently I suspect a problem in the way Easily have set up security or PHP on the new server.  Regular posting will commence as soon as all this is fixed.

As it’s almost the end of the year, this might be a good time to take stock of 2008.

I posted a lot more in 2008 - 168 out of my 196 posts were written this year.  I posted almost daily from October through December (until the sever move problems).  I also had a lot of comments and discussion on a few popular posts.

I switched from Blogger to WordPress and moved servers a couple times.

So what about 2009?

I intend to continue posting more or less daily.  Beyond that I don’t really have any plans.  I tend to be always trying out new technologies, so there’s no way to know where that will lead in the coming year.

I’ve wanted to add footnotes to my blog posts for a while – it’s a writing style I enjoy using – but it’s only recently that I actually thought to look for a WordPress plugin – doh.

The new WordPress 2.7 plugin browser makes that a lot less painful.  There were a few different footnote plugings, but in the end I settled on WP-Footnotes.

Once you’ve installed the plugin, using it is extremely simple – you just put your footnote in the text of your post surrounded by double parantheses.  When you view the post the plugin replaces the text in the double parantheses with a number and puts the footnote at the bottom of the post¹.

The number is automatically generated so you don’t have to work out the right one to use if you have a lot of footnotes, and the number is made a link so your readers can click on it to jump to the footnote and then click on a link there to jump back.

The only (very minor) problem I have with the plugin is that the footnotes are placed below the Zemanta related links and the Outbrain rating stars, but above the Disqus comments, so they can be hard to see.  It’s not the footnote plugin’s fault, it’s just a bit unfortunate.

1. Like this [↩]

I recently tried out the Broken Link Checker plugin for WordPress.  Unsurprisingly, the purpose of the plugin is to check your blog posts for broken links so you can fix or delete them as appropriate.

It goes through all your posts, collects all the links and checks them.  It does this once every few days and only when you have the admin interface open.

The plugin doesn’t slow your blog down, though the admin interface pages never seem to finish loading because they’re running the link checking code.

It found several broken links on my blog, along with some false positives.

To be honest I decided that I wasn’t that worried about the broken links.  A two year-old link to a page that no longer exists isn’t really a problem that needs fixing – it’s an honest historical record of the post.  In any case since the broken links refer to pages that have no replacement, the only option would be to remove the links completely and I’m not convinced the improvement would be worth the effort.

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I just found a cool WordPress plugin to help improve the performance of WordPress blogs - Use Google Libraries.

WordPress uses some JavaScript libraries, like jQuery and script.aculo.us.  Google hosts copies of some JavaScript libraries on their AJAX Libraries API.  What the plugin does is make WordPress use the copies of the libraries hosted by Google instead of the ones bundled with WordPress.  The advantage of this is that it:

• increases the chance that a user already has these files cached
• takes load off your server
• uses compressed versions of the libraries (where available)

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