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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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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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.

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.

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.

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

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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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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Image via CrunchBase

I tried FeedBurner back in the days when this blog was running Blogger, but I never really saw the point and I didn’t have any subscribers anyway.  Since then I switched to WordPress and FeedBurner was bought by Google, so I gave it another shot.

I’ve been using it for a while now, with mixed results.  The stats are inaccurate to the point where they seem random (and weren’t stats the original point?), their whole website is dreadfully slow, and there was no easy way to switch everyone over from the direct feed to the burned one.

Then today I read about a WordPress plugin called FeedBurner FeedSmith, which (somehow) takes care of that exact problem.  Hooray!

And then I noticed that the FeedBurner feed wasn’t working at all.  I checked Google Reader and sure enough, it hadn’t had a blog post in two weeks!  And I’ve been posting every day!  And although I have FeedMedic alerts set up, I never got one.

The FeedBurner feed was showing this error:

Error getting URL: 502 - Source feed is too large … maximum size is 512K

Which is fairly self-explanatory I suppose, but it still took a while to fix.  First of all I lowered the number of posts that WordPress sends to the feed from 500 down to 10.  Although that should bring down the feed size drastically, I was still getting the error.  It turns out that the trick is to ping FeedBurner so it actually tries getting your feed again rather than just showing you the error from the last time it tried.

So in the end all is well with the world.

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Image by RDENit via Flickr

Since IntenseDebate was bought by Automattic (makers of WordPress), they’ve been in private beta upgrading their infrastructure.

A couple days ago they came out of private beta with a new WordPress plugin.

The new plugin seems to overlap a lot with the features of the Disqus v2 plugin:

• Comment sync – comments are stored in WordPress as well as the external service so you don’t lose them if you stop using IntenseDebate
• Search Engine Optimization – comments are served by PHP same as the rest of your blog rather than added dynamically using JavaScript.  This means that they can be indexed by search engines same as the rest of your site
• Comment threading – puts replies to comments in a logical tree structure rather than a long list
• Comment voting and reputation – helps you identify good comments and commenters
• Comment moderation by email – lets you reply to and moderate comments from anywhere you have email access
• Trackbacks and Pingbacks are handled

Where the IntenseDebate plugin seems to exceed the Disqus one is in better integration with the WordPress admin page and widgets.

I’ve been using the Disqus v2 plugin since it was released so at the moment I don’t think I’ll be switching to IntenseDebate, but due to their newfound close relationship with WordPress they may provide better features and integration, in which case I’ll reconsider. 

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Image via CrunchBase

I’ve been using the PingPressFM plugin for WordPress for a while now, and while it’s fine at forwarding new post notifications to Ping.fm, it seems to be hard coded to use S3NT for URL shortening.

I like Cligs – it’s like TinyURL but it has some nice extra features like statistics.

With the new WordPress-to-Twitter Plugin, new post notifications get sent to Twitter (not Ping.fm), but on the upside it uses Cligs.

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Pingdom logo

I found out about a website called Pingdom from a blog post about WordPress optimization.  It was a pretty good post actually, because it also pointed me to the WP-DBManager plugin which lets you optimize and backup MySQL (and is very cool). 

Anyway, in the context of the post what got me interested in Pingdom was the website report that shows the load time of all the components of the page.  You can see the report for the main page of my blog here.

It has a quick website information display summary:

Pingdom website information

And a graph of load time that shows how each component (picture, css etc.) contributed to the total load time of the page:

Pingdom website graph

Although this is very cool, the website test tool doesn’t seem to be the main point of Pingdom – it’s website monitoring.  I’m currently having some issues with my Easily web hosting, so I’ve signed up for the 30 day trial of Pingdom.  I don’t know whether I’ll end up signing up for it – it’s useful but in the current economic client I’m trying to save money.

Basically Pingdom has servers all over the world, and you can set it up so that they ping your website.  You get graphs of response time and uptime, and it notifies you if your site goes down.

Pingdom response time report

You can see how frequently my hosting has been going down recently in the uptime report:

Pingdom uptime report

I’ve made the report public so you can see it here.

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Image via CrunchBase

Today I saw an announcement that a WordPress plugin called Outbrain had added support for Disqus, so the two plugins can automatically cooperate if they’re both installed.

I’ve installed it and so far it seems pretty cool - Outbrain lets visitors to my blog rate my posts, we’ll see whether any visitors make use of it and what they think.  It also gives stats on the ratings.

I did have some problems installing it – you get a claim code from their website and enter it into the plugin.  This proves that you own your blog and lets you begin using the plugin.  My claim process kept timing out and then suddenly it worked – it may have been a server-side problem, or because I initially just used my domain name instead of the path to my blog.

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Image via CrunchBase

When you write a blog post it’s nice to be able to publicize it a bit to increase its chances of being read.

One easy way of doing this is to post a link to your blog entry on social networking sites like Twitter.

The cross-posting process could be easier because it’s still a lot of effort to post to multiple social networking sites for every blog post.

Ping.fm simplifies this (because that’s its whole purpose), but it still requires you to remember to use ping.fm each time you write a blog post.

The PingPressFM plugin for WordPress solves this problem by automatically sending your blog post to ping.fm.  You set up triggers to use – for example you can have ping.fm forward the whole blog post to a blogging service like Tumblr, send an extract to a microblogging service like Twitter or set your status on a service like Facebook.

In the first post that I used PingPressFM with, I used the trigger that forwards the whole blog post.  The problem with this is that since v2.6, WordPress has added captions to images, and they use a non-HTML tag.  Neither PingPressFM, ping.fm nor the end recipient service seem to be able to strip or correctly process this tag.  So your blog post in the recipient service ends up with tag garbage in it.  I’ve reported the problem to PingPressFM support, ping.fm support and WordPress support, but so far there’s been no resolution.

In the second post that I used PingPressFM with, I used the trigger that sends an extract to microblogging services – that seemed to work fine.

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  Amazon S3 WordPress plugin

I’ve been using Amazon S3 for a while – I originally signed up in order to use JungleDisk, which uses S3 as its storage back end.

I only have good things to say about the service – you get unlimited storage, the pricing scheme is very reasonable and it has ridiculously good uptime.

I recently found the Amazon S3 plugin for WordPress, and tried it out for the first time in my last post.

The plugin has two ways for you to upload files.  There’s a button which just uploads the file and puts it directly into your post.  Intead of that, you can use the classic WordPress Add Image etc. buttons which have been modified by the plugin to store the files on S3 instead of your server.

I prefer using the classic buttons, because WordPress creates thumbnails for them and you can set a caption.

So far it seems to work perfectly and I’m considering going back through all my old posts and moving the media to S3.

One of the really cool things you can do with Amazon S3 (and you can take advantage of with the plugin) is use a CNAME DNS entry to use a subdomain to point to your S3 bucket.  This means that links to the uploaded files will be accessible using http://my.bucketname.com/ instead of http://bucketname.s3.amazonaws.com/.  Setting it up is a bit technical, but there are instructions.

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I was a bit worried about how long it takes some of the pages on here to load, so I’ve added the WP Super Cache WordPress plugin.

It’s a bit of a pain to install because you need to get .htaccess and permissions all right, but once it’s up and running it takes care of everything else.

I was a bit worried that the static cached versions of the pages might have some problems with dynamic content, but so far I haven’t noticed anything breaking.

I haven’t had it long enough to be able to measure what difference it makes.  It’s not like I have a lot of traffic, but the last thing I want to do is scare people off with a slow site.

One of the things I was concerned about was that if my site loads slowly it could negatively affect how I’m crawled by the Googlebot.  Again, I won’t know how much of an improvement the caching has made for a while.

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I’ve just added the Breadcrumb NavXT WordPress plugin to the blog – you can see the breadcrumbs just below the header at the top of all the pages.

Breadcrumbs are a representation of where a page is in the site hierarchy.  Each level of the hierarchy has a link – this lets visitors easily see where on the site the current page is, and helps them navigate around.

The plugin was a little tricky to set up – once you upload it to your FTP, two plugins show up in the WordPress admin screen.  One of them just puts the breadcrumbs on the pages, and the other one also enables the admin interface that lets you set the plugin up.  I can’t think of why you wouldn’t want the admin screen, because without it the plugin won’t work and you won’t know why.  Then when you get the admin screen there are loads of options and there’s no explanation of what they all do.

Anyway, once the plugin was set up it works really well and looks pretty good.

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Disqus logo

The Disqus blog comments service just had a major update to 2.0 – the new features are:

• New WordPress plugin featuring
  • Comments indexable by search engines
  • Import/export comments
  • Comments synchronized between WordPress and Disqus
  • Moderate comments from WordPress admin pages
• Faster – improved back end and retooled UI
• Comment blogs

Anyway, I’ve just updated the blog to use Disqus instead of the built-in WordPress comments system.  So far it seems pretty good, though I’ve only arrived at that opinion by looking at the old WordPress comments that I imported into Disqus.

Let me know what you think in the comments (did you see what I did there?)

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Download v2.0.0.87 here or look at what’s new here….

I’ve yet to try it out but will do in a few seconds… hitting “Check for updates” every day pays off! Must have latest version, must have, must have

Not obsessive compulsive, really