OMNINOGGIN

In response to JTPratt’s comment on my post, “Make Popularity Contest Work with WP-Super-Cache,” I am releasing a modification of Lester Chan’s WP-PostViews plugin to support counting using Javascript. Please try it out to see if this works for you.

A side note to Lester Chan and Richer Yang (WP-PostViews and WP-PostViews Plus authors repectively). Please feel free to contact me about incorporating these changes into WP-PostViews and/or WP-PostViews Plus so that it can be officially committed to the wp-plugins.org repository. I would create my own version of WP-PostViews in the repository, but do not want to steal your thunder :).

Read on…

Previously I wrote “Make Your WordPress 10X faster During Traffic Storms“, which is a post about automatically turning WP-[Super]-Cache on/off and automatically switching your WordPress theme to a lighter theme during heavy traffic. One of the main reasons that I had this setup was because I could not get statistics to work with WP-Super-Cache (i.e. my chCounter & Popularity Contest plugin is hosed).

After some tinkering, I was able to get chCounter and Popularity Contest to work with WP-Super-Cache. This involves using javascript to count instead of PHP. chCounter was a simple change, but Popularity Contest was a bit more challenging. Usually I would immediately post the “How-to” here, or rather release the modded plugin to the public myself, but I believe that I shouldn’t step on Alex King’s shoes (the original developer of Popularity Contest). I’ve sent the Popularity Contest code to Alex for code review. He’s been doing some of the same work, and hopefully he can incorporate some of my changes into the plugin and release it to the public soon.

If anybody would like to use my version of the Popularity Contest before Alex King releases it to the public, you may download the WordPress 2.3.3 and WordPress 2.5 compatible version here:
Read on…

Today I would like to announce the release of “Nowthen Photo Display” WordPress widget that parses picture RSS feeds from the image service nowthen.com and displays the pictures neatly on the sidebar. This is my first WordPress widget so any comments and suggestions are welcomed. I would be happy to make updates/releases if the demand for this widget is high enough and there are some worthwhile feature requests.

Screenshots

Sidebar Widget

Widget Options

Gallery

Gallery Options

Read on…

I am a semi-fan of WP-Cache. On the good side, it reduces strain on apache by staticising WordPress pages. On the bad side, it messes with my site statistics and makes development hard (I always forget that the page I’m working on is being cached). I like my statistics, but what if I suddenly get a traffic storm? If my site gets dugg, there is no time to worry about statistics. I would need all the help I can get to serve pages efficiently. This is why WP-Cache should be off by default and automatically turned on during traffic storms. Read on…