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Just today, I decided to run an impromptu experiment to test if visitors who come from search engines are really more likely to click on ads. It’s considered  ”common knowledge” by many bloggers who advise everyone to only show ads to search engine visitors (as a quick Google search will illustrate), but my own AdSense [...]

I recently stumbled upon a great jQuery plugin called “timeago” that lets you easily create fuzzy timestamps (e.g. “5 minutes ago”, “about 2 months ago”, etc). So I wrote a quickie WP plugin that you can use to add this neat feature to your blog.
About
Basically, with this plugin you can insert a little piece of [...]

Some WordPress themes include custom page templates that let you add a custom layout or some nifty feature to specific pages. But sometimes you need the exact opposite – a page to be as bare, unadorned, downright plain as possible. No header, no menus, no nothing – just the HTML that you entered in the [...]

Lately, I have noticed that blogging has become harder than it should be. Even when I have a decent post outline ready, I still spend 30 minutes obsessing over every sentence, never sure if it’s good enough. This kills the “flow” and results in a stilted writing style. In short, I’ve fallen victim to premature [...]

Behold, I bring you even more WordPress-related statistics! Today : the most popular words in plugin names. Use them to come up with new plugin ideas, figure out which services/features are over- or under-represented in the WP plugin ecosystem, and more.
Here’s a tag cloud of the names of all plugins listed in the WordPress.org directory [...]

In this post I will explain what the “Viralogy.com script” thing mentioned in the Broken Link Checker survey was all about, discuss the user response and attempt to verbalize my rather unclear thoughts on the issue.
Viralogy Script
About two weeks ago, I received an offer to bundle a social media tracking script from Viralogy with my [...]

Last week I invited everyone who uses my Broken Link Checker plugin to answer a user feedback survey. The survey consisted of 11 questions covering a number of topics from overall user satisfaction to feature suggestions, monetization options and questions about the user’s server configuration. In this post I will summarize the results and maybe [...]

If you’re a blogger, would you kindly run some numbers for me? It will only take a minute, and you might learn something interesting about your site as a result.
First, take the total number of comments made on your blog and divide it by the total number of posts. This will give you the average [...]

I’ve just released a major update for Eclipse Link Cloaker – the premium link cloaking plugin for WordPress.  Version 1.1 includes a fine selection of bug fixes and UI enhancements, as well as two big new features : the ability to automatically turn specified keywords into links, and conversion tracking support. The new version is [...]

The end of a year is a time for reflection. A time to look back on your accomplishments, and also a time to give thanks to the people who helped you along the way. So, once again, I’ve compiled a list of the top WP developers whose plugins have been an immense boon to [...]

Sometimes you might want to find out if a website is built with WordPress, and which specific version of WP it’s running. In this post I’ll discuss a number of detection techniques, including ways to deal with sites that hide the fact that they’re running WordPress or spoof the version info.
For non-programmers : If you [...]

Behold, a new version of the Broken Link Checker plugin for WordPress is available! This release includes the routine batch of bug fixes, two new translations (Spanish and Belorussian), an option to mark removed links with a special CSS class and, most importantly, a Search box :

The URL field supports wildcards, so “pla*.com” will match [...]

I’ve recently added internationalization support to my Broken Link Checker plugin, so if you like the plugin and would like to see it in your own language, consider contributing a translation! So far people are working, or have already sent in, localization files for the following languages :

Italian (complete; even got two – by Gianni [...]

During the last few months I have been working on an improved premium version of my popular link cloaking plugin. And now, on this unquestionably glorious day, I finally deem it sufficiently polished and bug-free to be ready for public release. So if you do affiliate marketing and want to protect your commissions, go check [...]

WordPress automatically checks for plugin, theme and core updates once every 12 hours. This is normally fine, but it can become annoying when you know there’s an important update or bugfix available yet it won’t show up in your Dashboard until the next time WP gets around to checking for it. Of course, you can [...]

A few months ago, WordPress.org introduced a new feature available to plugins hosted in the Plugin Directory – changelogs. Having an easily accessible changelog is certainly a usability plus, but I felt it created unnecessary work for plugin developers. Personally, I usually provide meaningful log messages (example) when uploading a new version of a plugin [...]

Packt Publishing is running their 2009 Open Source CMS Award, so go forth and nominate your favorite CMS for one of the award categories! And in case you’re not sure which CMS to vote for, here’s a friendly suggestion:

Clik the image to go to the nomination screen with WordPress pre-selected
Hat tip to [...]

WordPress.org has an Ideas section where users can post their suggestions for new WordPress features and comment on ideas posted by other users. If you’re a plugin developer or just someone who blogs about WP, this page is a good place to look for new… well, ideas. It doesn’t have an RSS feed though, so [...]

I’m planning to release my first commercial WordPress plugin later this month. The plugin will be an improved version of the Link Cloaking plugin and will include a bunch of new and exciting features, like cloaking links anywhere on the site (as opposed to only detecting links inside post/page content) and the ability to display [...]

Social proof is an easy way to bump your traffic figures a little bit and make yourself look more authoritative. Today I’ll show you five simple ways to apply it to your WordPress blog.
Preface
The essence of “social proof” is simple : when people don’t have a lot of information about something, they will usually look [...]

After the Deadline is an advanced spell checker plugin for WordPress that was released on Monday. In addition to the standard spell check and suggestions features, it also includes style and grammar checking. The plugin also lets you define custom dictionary of sorts – you can set it to always ignore certain words. Here’s the [...]

The latest version of Broken Link Checker for WordPress is now available on WordPress.org. If you’re already using the plugin you should get an update notification within 24 hours. Below you’ll find a list of changes and a bit commentary about the update.
Around 20 people downloaded the beta version. I haven’t received any death threats [...]

I love all kinds of tweaks and utilities, be it software-specific addons or standalone tools. WordPress is no exception – if server hardware was infinitely capable, I’d probably have a hundred or so plugins installed.
But since the Moore’s law is being all too tardy, there’s a constant pressure to weed out underperforming and superfluous plugins. [...]

The next major update of the Broken Link Checker plugin is almost done. I’ve added several new, oft-requested features and rewritten most existing functions to make them more secure and faster. However, as anyone who has at least dabbled in programming will know, lots of code changes equals lots of potential for new bugs. So [...]

Having up-to-date backups is an essential safeguard in case something goes wrong with your website. So some time ago I installed WP-DBManager and configured it to send a daily backup of my WordPress database to my GMail account. All was well, until last week the backup process failed five times in a row. Upon checking [...]

Highlight Search Terms is a WordPress plugin that can highlight search terms on your blog’s search page. The plugin is based on a tutorial by Thaya Kareeson, but it also includes several additional features not present in the tutorial and better browser compatibility.
Features

Multiple colors : Each word of the search query is higlighted in a [...]

The recent WeblogToolsCollection post about a new antispam plugin “WP Mollom” got me thinking. What’s the main problem with Akismet? It’s certainly good enough at catching spam – it only misses about 4 spam comments per month on this blog and has nearly 99.9% accuracy overall. However, the situation might not be so rosy when [...]

One of the reasons why WordPress can be slow is that it loads all active plugins on each and every page, even if some of those plugins aren’t actually used on that page. For example, an active anti-spam plugin will still be loaded even if the current page doesn’t contain a comment form (e.g. category [...]

Even after two years of blogging, I’m still not rich and famous. Why is that, and how can you avoid the same moderately unpleasant fate? In this post I’ll discuss some blogging mistakes that (still) interfere with the success of this site.
#1 Lack of focus
Pretty much every blogging-related guide begins with “pick a niche”. Having [...]

Say you stumble upon a WordPress blog that has a gorgeous design. Amazed, you wonder what theme they’re using. Of course, it would be straightforward to just email the blog’s author and ask, but it might take a few hours (or days) until they get back to you. Here are three simple ways to identify [...]