Web Talk

I know, I know that I have already reviewed WPAU (Wordpress Automatic upgrade) in the past, but you know, I am almost compelled to write about this excellent plugin for Wordpress again. Above all since it is one of the few plugins I really like, care and use, without speaking about the fact that WPAU lets, really lets Web Talk live and survive in this tough Internet world made out of endless updates.  When last year I started looking for a good Content Management System, one of the biggest concerns of mine was to be able to find a software which came with a kind of automatic upgrade. After the bad, really bad upgrade experiences with Mambo and Joomla! I really craved for something easy to use. My only goal, here in the web, is write. I want to focalise myself on writing good reviews and guides. That’s it. That’s why in 2007 I started surfing all of the web looking for something easy to use which let me concentrate on my work. But, with my disbelief, I found out that what I was looking for didn’t exsit. At that point I made one last attempt in Google by typing “automatic upgrade” and after a few pages Wordpress Automatic Upgrade popped out, outstanding with all its wonderful features from the list of results Google gave me. And that’s how I ended up picking Wordpress as my blogging platform. (so, thanks Keith Dsouza, really thanks a lot for creating your wonderful plugin…come on, I know that you read this blog regularly!). Yesterday WPAU has reached its 1.2.0.2 version and a lot of improvements have been made concerning stability, security and bug fixes. But let’s see a brief list of its features.

• Upgrade your Wordpress blog  in a couple of easy steps! No special knowledge is required.
• WPAU is fully compatible with Wordpress 2.6 and up.
• WPAU only lets you upgrade if your WP is out-of-date.
• WPAU now uses Snoopy to download files rather than using regular PHP methods.
• WPAU alerts you when a new WP update is available.
• Automatic Upgrade option will only be visible to Administrators.

Keith Dsouza is also working hard on the next Wordpress Automatic Upgrade (version 1.3) and in his blog he anticipated some of its new thrilling features. Here is a list.

• Better user interface which will let see user see what is going on during the update in real time!
• Ability for users to choose the language of WordPress they want to download from.
• Internationalization support.
• Cleanup of code to make WPAU more faster.

If you want to download Wordpress Automatic Update, click here. If you want to visit the blog of Keith Dsouza, the author of this excellent plugin, here is the link.

As you know I am always looking for nice widgets to add to my website which don’t require a lot of work to set them up. Yes I know, I am a bit lazy, but that’s the way I like things. Some days ago I started looking for a widget which could tell my visitors the best articles for the current day. After browsing for a while I found an excellent website offering freeware widgets easy to install. The website is called feedjit.com and with a simple copy-and-past procedure lets you add your website a full set of interesting infos. Here is a list of its widgets:

• Life Traffic Feed: this widget shows how many people are visiting your website, where they come from (thanks to a nice flag of the visitor’s country), which website they arrived from, if any, which page they visited on your website and which external link they clicked to leave your site, if any.
• Live Traffic Map: this widget reminds me of another good one which can be seen on this article of mine. It shows you the last 100 people who visited your website on a small map. If you move your mouse’s pointer on any red point on the map, you will be able to see where your visitors come from (country and city).
• Live Raccomending Reading: this widget suggests other pages on your website your readers may be interested in.
• Live Page Popularity: this widget shows you the most popular pages (usually the first 10 pages of the current day) on your website by analysing your recent traffic.

All widgets are fully customisable. In fact you can decide: text color, background color, border color, heading color and widget’s width.

I strongly recommend this website to those people who want and need simple but effective stat widgets but, at the same time, don’t want to spend too much time to tweak them or understand how they work. In fact with Feedjit.com, all you need to do is to copy a code and past it in your website or blog.

Have you ever wished to get some business cards to show to your friends or people you come in contact with at work? No, I am not talking about real business cards but electronic cards which, apart from being for free, let you show who you are and other important infos. Retaggr.com lets you have your own private business cards with a few easy steps. The service Retaggr.com offers you goes beyond the simple creation of cards. As a matter of fact, once registered to the website, you will be able to leave your profile card whenever you leave a comment on the internet, show your recent twitter messages, display your online activity, link to your card from anywhere on the web etc. If you are a webmaster instead you can have your personal widget to stick on your Wordpress website, specify content from your site to be shown within Profile Cards, make your content more useful while keeping readers on your site etc. The service is totally  free and it just requires a quick registration.

If you have a Wordpress blog and you want to test a new theme just to see how it looks like or if it works, sometimes you maybe at loss about how to try it without putting your blog on maintenance mode, or letting your readers see what kind of online changes you are doing while you are testing it. These two plugins I am about to speak of are meant to solve these kind of issues. User Level Themes and Theme Tester let you test your blog theme without affecting your readers’ navigation. The way they work is rather simple. Basically they redirect visitors to a known working theme, while they leave you free to test and work on your new theme. But let’s see together their most important features:

User level Theme

• Two options are available if you want to test a theme namely: “Administrator Level” and “Visitor Level”.
• User Level Theme uses Wordpress Plugin Framework to work. WPF provides a standard administration interface and allow for simplified plugin management.

Theme Tester

• Simple to use. One click and you are done.

A few days ago I spoke about the new Wordpress 2.5 and its nasty bugs located in the Media Section. The all new Media Section is based on Adobe Flash technology and lets you upload multiple files at once into the gallery. The whole process can be followed thanks to the new indicator bar. Anyway the upload process is buggy and at some point, it stops working with the result that files are not uploaded at all. The symptoms are very different. A few of them include: nothing happens when you try to upload a file; after the word “Crunching” appears the uploading process stops; HTTP errors; during the upload the browser crashes or freezes; media buttons disappears etc. There are a lot of ways to fix this issue while waiting for the new Wordpress release. Some of them are listed here. Another fix can be applied by downloading a patch. More support and workarounds can be found here. If you have issues with Media Section and you are using Firefox try this trick. If you have issues with Media Section and you use Mac OS X browser try this trick. Continue reading »

This nice website is 1 year old but, to tell you the truth, I didn’t know about it at all. But what is Yahoo! Pipes? Basically it is a place where you can set your fantasy free and try to create nice widgets for your blog (TypePad, Blogger, WordPress, iGoogle). To start using it you need a Yahoo! account. The thing you don’t need to start playing with it, its the hard-to-get-without-studying-hard programmer’s knowledge. As a matter of fact, you can start creating nice widgets from scratch in a few steps, and without knowing any piece of code. The way it works is rather simple. Once you are in, click on “create a pipe” and a white page will appear. On its left there are lots of buttons describing what they do or the functions they represent (most of them are related to feeds. The application itself is based on a fetch-feeds system). Drag them on the screen, link them to each other, debug the widget created and you are done! The widgets you create are available in one of these three combinations: the widgets show you a list of infos such as news, the widgets show you results on a map, the widgets show you pictures. Is it too easy to be good? Watch the video and get an idea about what I am talking about.

Since I am always looking for something original and nice to add to my website, namely widgets and small services to give my readers something new to play with, today I want to speak of some widgets I found on the nice, but rather simple website called whos.among.us. These widgets are not really widgets to tell you the truth. In fact they are just pieces of codes to copy and past wherever you want on your blog (no installation is required). Anyway the results and the effects they give you are the ones belonging to widgets for real! You have to know that I have been looking for a widget giving me the exact location of my online readers and the exact number of them for a long time. I have to confess you that I am really piky when it comes to choose something to add to my blog, since I don’t want to burden it with too many features which sometimes can slow it down. A few days ago I stumbled upon whos.among.us and I was really amazed at what it offered me. Let’s see together these widgets in detail:

• Whos: This little widget gives you and your readers the chance to know how many people are online in your blog. You can choose among different kinds of stickers. You can choose the colors and the shape of the widget itself to adapt it to your blog’s feel and look.
• Maps: With it, you can add your blog a map showing where you readers comes from. The map itself is highly customisable. In fact you can choose its colors and dimensions. I decided to choose a small map for my blog because I wanted to put it in the frontpage for everybody to see. If you want to you can click on it to see the map bigger and see where the readers come from in a more effective way.
• Graphs: This is not a real widgets. It is rather an extra service coming from the other two widgets. It is a graphic showing you statistics of the people visiting your blog. You can choose the lapse of time to see: 24 hours, 31 days, 12 months, 5 years. The graph also shows you the minimum, the maximum and the average of your readers in a due period.

I like these widgets. They are simple, effective and no special knowledge is required. All widgets should be like that. Just copy the code provided and you are done! I recommend it to everyone!

A few days ago I got my chance to help Daniele Lippi fix some bugs he had on his nice plugin. Something seemed not to work properly, but in the end Daniele managed to get the bug and fix it… Wait a minute, but who is Danile Lippi? Well, he is the guy behind Statpress. Actually he made it (and pretty well I dare say!). If you need a very reliable tool to monitor your blog’s visitors but you think that Google Analytics is too tricky to understand, while Wordpress Stat is too simple to use, the only solution you have got is Statpress. I myself have it and I have to tell you that I am amazed by the way it is accurate, precise and…reliable. In fact, with Statpress not only you have the opportunity to monitor your visitors but you can also:

• See your visitor’s trend (thanks to a graph) for 7,10,20,30,50 days.
• See what posts your visitors read more.
• See where you visitors come from, what OS, browser and IP they use.
• See what keywords your visitors used and on what search engine they used them to reach your blog.
• See what spiders crawl your blog.
• See detailed lists about: last hits, last search term, last referrers, last agents and last pages.

But Statpress is more than this ( just in case all these features are not sufficient for you). With it you can also see a list of those browsers, operative systems, feeds, search engines which were used to surf or reach your blog. You can export all the data you want as a CVS file just in case you want to look at your statistics later. Of course there are other features and the list could go on and on. I just want to tell you that every time I login as administrator the first, the only thing I do, is to look at my statistics to see what is happening and what happened in my blog. If you are a blogger you know how important it is to have a complete vision of all the most important things that are happening in your blog and you also know how important it is to see and understand what your visitors are doing, what they read and what they hate about your blog. Having a complete visitors’ statistics (and much more) help you improve the blog and increase the number of the visitors themselves. Well, if you think in the same way I do then this plugin is for you. Download Statpress here. If you want some help ask me or visit Daniele Lippi forum here.