The next major release of the Broken Link Checker plugin is nearing completion. Some of the highest voted ideas have been implemented, the user interface has been re-worked and many bugs have been fixed. Interested? Play with the alpha version, check out new features before anyone else, submit last-minute feedback. I’m especially interested in your thoughts about the new interface – layout, colours, wording.

What’s New

Implemented and available right now :

• Individually pick the types of content to check for links.
• Check drafts, scheduled and private posts.
• Colour-coded “Status” column in the link table.
• Show/hide columns selectively.
• “Compact” table view – each row becomes exactly two lines, no text wrapping. Slick.
• Select how many links per page to display.
• New URL editor.
• Tabbed interface for the settings page.

Implemented, but not yet public. Probably reserved for a “Pro” version :

• Check embedded YouTube, DailyMotion and Vimeo videos.
• Specialized checker algorithms for RapidShare, Mediafire and MegaUpload links.
• Custom post type support.
• Check plaintext URLs.

Screenshots

The new “Broken Links” page (click to enlarge) :

The new settings page :

Thoughts?

• Broken Link Checker forum
• Admin Menu Editor forum
• Eclipse Link Cloaker forum

If you use any of these plugins and you think that they could be improved, head over to the corresponding forum and post your idea!

Even if you’ve already sent me your suggestion using e-mail or blog comments, you should still go to the appropriate forum and post it there. This will give other users the opportunity to vote and comment on them. Suggestions that are supported by multiple users are likely to be implemented much sooner than they would otherwise be

If this catches on I will eventually create feedback forums for my other WordPress plugins.

On a completely unrelated note, here is a picture of a playful feline :

(Clicken sie das bild to enlarge)

Benchmarks Used

• SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark
• SlickSpeed Selector Test (WebKit version; jQuery results were used in the chart above)
• CSS Rendering Benchmark
• The HTML5 Test
• Windows Performance Monitor (to track CPU usage).

Personal Notes

As could be expected, the light-weight Chrome comes out as the winner in most benchmarks (though sometimes only by a bit) and the much-loathed IE trails the pack. It’s also nice to see that Opera (my personal favourite) has improved so greatly with the 10.51 release.

However, the relatively modest performance of Firefox 3.6 surprised me. Ordinarily one could write it off as the result of running way too many extensions, but that’s unlikely to be the case this time – all the benchmarks were run using a new, clean profile. It’s a mystery.

If you’re feeling courageous, you can download the in-development version and try out the new features right now, bugs and all. The final & reasonably stable version should be ready in a week or so.

You can find a full list of new features and changes below. Any user suggestions not on this list won’t get implemented for v. 0.9, but they still remain on my to-do/idea list for the plugin, and may well be realized eventually.

What’s New

The big changes :

• Checking comment links.
• Email notifications.
• Run the link checker when you’re not logged in (via Cron).
• Recheck selected links via Bulk Actions.
• Suspend checking if the server is overloaded.
• The confusing “Discard” button is gone; replaced by a “Not broken” action link.
• Better handling of false positives. If you mark a link as “Not broken”, the plugin will memorize the server response that made it think the link was broken, and treat the link as working unless/until it gets a different response when it checks that link again.
• Support for custom checking algorithms, e.g. for dealing with YouTube and RapidShare links (not implemented yet, but the required scaffolding is there).

The minor stuff :

• Additional icons (from FamFamFam) for the link table.
• The “Delete sources” action asks for confirmation before deleting anything.
• Long HTTP headers in the log no longer cause the “Details” section to expand ridiculously.
• FTP, mailto:, javascript: and other links with unsupported protocols now show up in the “All links” table.
• The rarely used “Exclude” link is gone. You can still exclude links by adding the URL or domain to the exclusion list in settings.
• Editing links via the plugin’s interface creates new post revisions (where applicable), so you can revert the changes if something goes wrong.
• Searching by link text now uses simple pattern matching, not full-text search.
• Added Czech translation.
• Requirements upped to WP 2.9+

To Do

Things that need to be done before the final release :

• Test and tweak email notifications.
• Test and tweak load limiting.
• Update localization files.
• Make “Trash” links use AJAX, where possible.
• Obsess over the wording of error messages.
• Code clean-up.

• 22 Linkbait  Headlines Almost Every Blogger Can Use
• Making the WordPress .htaccess more efficient
• Making Money With Open-Source (a StackOverflow thread)
• Harmony – Procedural Drawing Tool (can turn semi-random doodles into impressive & stylish sketches)
• Rainy Mood (create a “rainy” ambience whenever you want)
• ClipX – multiple clipboards for Windows (indispensable)
• Neural Mesh – artificial neural networks for PHP
• CogTool – a UI prototyping tool with a twist
• CodeBubbles Demo (a very innovative Java IDE)
• Syndk8 Black Hat SEO forum (if you’ve ever wondered how (some) blackhats think…)
• The Uncertaing Future (Wondering when will human-level AI be invented? This web app enables you to make your own almost-scientific probabilistic estimate.)

With all this commotion and ad-blocker evangelizing going on, one has to wonder – is AdBlock on the way to becoming the norm, and thus completely devaluing online advertising?

No. Not even close.

I’ve run the numbers. If current Internet usage trends persist, people who use AdBlock Plus (and other ad-blocking plugins) will always be a tiny minority. Sure, it might have some impact on the ad revenue of websites that target the tech-savvy crowd. But advertisers in general will probably always see AdBlock as just a minor annoyance – if that.

See the stats below.

AdBlock Plus Popularity

By last count, there were ~1,734 million Internet users in the world. AdBlock Plus, the most popular ad-blocking plugin, has ~10 million active users. Thus, only about 0.6% of all Internet users have AdBlock installed.

Growth Rates

In the last two years, the number of Internet users has been increasing by about 19.7 million each month, and this growth is accelerating. I wasn’t able to find complete historical data for AdBlock Plus, but judging by these stats (see the monthly view) the number of AdBlock users is currently increasing by about 315 thousand per month. And it seems to be slowing down lately.

With a growth rate disparity this huge, AdBlock will never catch up.

Sources : InternetWorldStats.com, AdBlock Plus usage statistics

Here’s a quick run-down of the techniques that are currently ranked the highest, with some pertinent links :

• Monoidealism (+9, 2 reviews)
  Have one and only one thought absorbing your non-verbal imagination. Do only one thing at a time.
• Collaboration with Others (+8, 2 reviews)
• Think It, Do It (+6, 2 reviews)
  As soon as you become aware of something that needs to be done and can be done (without major disruption), then I do it right away.
• Cripple your Internet (+4.7, 10 reviews)
  Install a browser add-on that prevents you from visiting time-waster sites like Facebook and Reddit.
  • LeechBlock (+5.4, 5 reviews)
  • PageAddict (+3, 1 review)
  • Freedom (Mac)
• Regular Exercise (+4.5, 2 reviews)
• Melatonin (+4.0, 5 reviews)
  Waste less time on sleeping  (the reviews note that melatonin does not work for everyone).
• Execute by Default (+3.7, 7 reviews)
  Instead of deciding whether to do something, come up with a plan that includes that something and decide to follow the plan.
• Getting Things Done (+3.3, 3 reviews)
• Utility Function Experiment (+3.3, 3 reviews)
  Attach point values to various actions and try to maximize your score.

See the LessWrong post for more details.

Google, and Avatar, and Windows 7, oh my. And CSS makes a delicious surprise appearance! Boom De Yada indeed.

You may be wondering how I got it to show suggestions that end with a specific phrase. Here’s the trick : First, enter your query as normal. Then move the cursor to the beginning of the text box and hit space. You should now get query suggestions that end with the phrase you entered. This works because Google takes into account the last known cursor position when generating the suggestion list.

The solution? Writing more, of course From now on, I will attempt to consistently post at least three times per week. Preferably four, if that’s feasible. I may also post more about some topics that I have previously ignored.

Sidenote : 3 posts/week may not seem like an awfully ambitious goal, but I feel it’s right in my case. For me, writing blog posts is a hobby.  I don’t want to become someone who blogs every day. I want to get better at blogging, not make it the focus of my life.

The rest of this post discusses the why’s and how’s, and how it affects you – the reader.

Why Write More?

Practice. In the immortal words of comrade Lenin : “Practice, practice and practice again!” If you ask any experienced writer how to get better at writing, chances are the first advice you’ll get will be “write more”. To improve a skill you must exercise it.

“Get into the groove”. Whether you want it or not, what you do on a day-to-day basis affects how you see the world around you and what opportunities you notice. Right now, I mostly view the world through a programmer’s lens. When I look at something, I see ways I could automate and simplify it. I see software to build, algorithms to invent, object hierarchies to map. It comes naturally. I want to get the same effect for blogging.

Clean out the idea list. It’s good practice to note down any interesting ideas that cross your mind. Then you can refer back to your notes if you ever run out inspiration or hit the writer’s block. The flip-side of this is that comprehensive idea lists can “go stale” – over time, the great ideas get implemented and the shitty ones get thrown out, but the “maybe’s” stay on the list. Instead of a source of inspiration, the list becomes a wellspring of self-doubt (“Is this article idea good enough? Should I try this project or just forget about it?”).

The solution is to find and eliminate stale ideas, either by implementing them or discarding them. This is what I intend to do – take some of the blog posts and post ideas that have sat on my idea list for a veritable eternity, and actually write them. More room for new ideas.

Cast a wider net. Finally, covering more topics and moving into new niches increases the probability of accidentally stumbling upon something great.

Why (This) Blog?

Now you might wonder : why not use a private notebook or text file instead of a public blog? Alternatively, why not start a new blog? Worry not – I have several unquestionably convincing arguments and justifications lined up.

• Doing it “for real”. If you want to become a better blogger, it’s common sense that you should train in a maximally realistic environment – i.e. posting on an actual blog.
• Getting real-world feedback instead of relying on biased self-evaluation. We’re all lousy critics when dealing with our own texts. If you want an unbiased opinion about something you’ve written, you need to show it to other people.
• Making a public commitment creates accountability and increases motivation.
• Finally, I’m too lazy to set up another blog.

What To Expect

So what does all this mean for you as a reader?

Believe it or not, but I have a pretty high standard for what is worthy of a blog post. In general, I’ve tried to stick with only posting stuff that is likely to be of practical use to someone – namely, software (plugins, addons, scripts) and tutorials. This can lead to long pauses between new posts when I’m working on a new software project (these take a long time) or when I run out of tutorial ideas. As a result, my posting schedule is sometimes very messed-up.

To have any hope of consistently meeting the 3-4 posts per week goal, I’ll need to change the criteria and post things that I normally wouldn’t. You can expect to see more opinion pieces, software/service reviews and pseudo-philosophical rants. To illustrate what that could be like, here’s a small selection of my earlier posts that fall into one of those categories :

• Quantum Immortality Is Useless
• Game Review : Love
• What “Be Yourself” Really Means
• The Teddy Bears of Climate Change
• AI Researchers Can’t Get a Break
• This post itself.

Of course, I will still post about WordPress and other tech-related stuff, too.

Gimme Ideas!

Got any questions about WordPress/PHP/etc that you’d like to see answered in the form of a blog post? Leave a comment on this post (or shoot me an email)!

There needs to be a way to link to a page on Reddit and automatically apply Readability.

That seemed like an excellent idea to me. In case you haven’t heard about it yet, Readability is a bookmarklet that can take an article or blog post with even the most cluttered, ad-infested and eye-bleedingly ugly design and turn it into a clean and readable work of art. As a side-effect, it also removes most kinds of ads.

Of course, you could just install the bookmarklet for your own use and have that be the end of it. But if you regularly share links to interesting articles with friends, or post them to social bookmarking sites, it would sure be handy to have a way give others the benefit of Readability without forcing them to install anything.

So I went ahead and created a website that lets you do just that – MakeReadable.com. Go check it out.

Here’s how to use it :

1. Enter a URL of the page  that you want to make more readable. Pages with lots of text – like news articles or blog posts – work best.
2. Click the “Make Readable” button (or press Enter).
3. Wait a few seconds while the server processes the page and redirects you to a new URL that already has Readability applied.
4. Share the URL of the new page with your friends, etc.

An even easier way to use this service is to simply append the URL of the page you want processed after http://makereadable.com/, like this :

http://makereadable.com/example.com/someblog/article-123.htm

Behind the scenes, MakeReadable.com also performs several other optimizations, like normalizing the HTML and stripping out all other scripts and most CSS. Since Readability completely restyles the page anyway, this post-processing makes the resulting page smaller and faster-loading (in theory) without hurting its looks.

Thoughts? Feature suggestions? Leave a comment below.