Vlad

Version 0.2 of the Wordpress.com Stats Helper Plugin is out. Among the main changes:

• internal, option-based, cache for data fetched from wordpress.com
• added possibility to not display post views count (when using either as a function or as a widget)
• capped post list to a maximum of 25 items

Andy expressed some serious concern when I first asked him to review this plugin: it was using wp_cache for data fetched from stats.wordpress.com. By default the cache is not enabled in wordpress (you have to manually set a variable in wp-config.php). He suggested I use the options to emulate a cache for my plugin. Here’s how I did it: Read more »

If you’re using Wordpress to blog chances are you’ll want to see who’s reading your blog and what are the topics of interest. Enter stage left: wordpress.com stats!

The official stats plugin is wonderful and it integrates neatly into your blog’s (or your wp.com global) dashboard. It works great for people with many blogs, it works even greater if you already some wp.com blogs and some private hosted blogs. It’s hot!

But can it do more than satisfying your crave for ego bumping?

Can it help your blog? I believe so.

Here’s how: now matter how people are arriving on your blog (be it from a feed reader, a referrer link or some search engine) changes are they’ll be missing on what’s really important and interesting about your blog. If you could tell them what other people have found if interest maybe they’ll take so time and dive into those posts. Who knows, maybe you could turn them into regular visitors!

And you can do that, and it’s easy! Wordpress.com stats plugin is able to give you that info. And this why I developed a stats helper plugin. It’s used right here, on this blog’s Most Visited Posts top panel.

Hope it will help you!

On Barak’s suggestion I’ve added the possibility to keep the overall table width fixed. His proposed implementation was compensating for a cell’s width change by altering the width of the neighbouring cell. I’ve rewrote that into the tablekit-trueresize.js extension.

Since I was pretty much rewriting everything I’ve added two new parameters:

• trueResize – set to true for the resize to recalculate the table width
• fixedResize – set to true for the resize to keep the table width fixed (only works if trueResize is also true)

Usage:

TableKit.Resizable.init(table,
    {'trueResize' : true, 'keepWidth' : true});

I’ve updated the demo page too.

More info on the tablekit true resize page.

If you need to quickly test a RegEx pattern for Java or Javascript these two resources might come in handy:

• Jakarta RegExp Test Applet – for Java, uses the Jakarta Regexp package
• Javascript RegExp Tester – for Javascript, uses live in-browser matching