By Jeffro on February 16, 2012
Are you one of those folks who can’t get enough WordPress in your RSS FeedReader? If so, WPMU.org has published their list of 99 different WordPress related websites. The list was comprised via publicly available data and is completely objective. It was cool to see WPTavern come in at number 14 but I would have been happy to see the site make it anywhere on the list. Out of those sites that have made the top ten, the only one I don’t recognize is http://bavotasan.com/. In fact, I’ve never heard of the site until reviewing this list. The only thing missing from the post is the ability to take an OPML file and import the sites directly into a FeedReader. At any rate, I’ll have a good time visiting each one of the sites that I don’t already know about and manually adding them to my list. I could always use more great articles to link to for those days where it looks like nothing is going on.
Posted in News | Tagged list, resources, wordpress |
By Jeffro on February 15, 2012
I discovered Pinterest through Twitter as a number of the people I follow have been chatting about it as well as linking to content on the site. It seems that Pinterest has quickly become the new “cool” way to bookmark things across the web. One of those items that people pin to their virtual bulletin board could be a post from your website. If you want to make it easy for Pinterest users to pin your articles, consider using the Pin-It button plugin from PDerksen. The plugin provides most of the options necessary to configure where and when the Pin-It button will show up.
How many of you are using Pinterest for WordPress related content? I’ve signed up but I don’t have time to bookmark things or visit the Pinterest website on a regular basis.
Posted in Plugins | Tagged bookmark, pinterest, plugin |
By Jeffro on February 15, 2012
Dave Clements of DoItWithWP.com shared his experience with a plugin that’s new to me called P3 Plugin Performance Profiler. After performing an automatic scan on the WPTavern website, the profiler provided me a pie chart along with other metrics that allowed me to easily tell which plugins were capable of slowing the site down. Here are some of the metrics after running the scan on WPTavern.com:
The scan consisted of 15 random page visits. I have 25 Active Plugins. Those plugins accounted for 51% of the page load time. There was an average of 38 MySQL queries per visit. The plugin load time was 0.233 seconds per visit. Within this scan, Ajax Edit Comments was the slowest plugin out of the bunch at 21% and 0.0491 seconds while Yet Another Related Posts Plugin took second place with 17% and 0.0408 seconds. Meanwhile, Woopra consistently was within the top three for slowest performers.
P3 Profile Scan
After the scan is completed, you have a few different options of drilling into the data. The detailed breakdown tab will show you a bar chart that displays the worst offenders. There are other means of figuring out the data as well such as viewing the simple timeline tab or the advanced metrics tab.
Here are the advanced metrics for the scan I performed at 6 A.M. this morning.
At the time this scan was conducted, it took less than 1 second to load the entire website. Plugins only accounted for 0.2331 seconds on average. I’m sure I could figure out how to decrease that amount of time but when the numbers are this small, is it worth the trouble to shrink them anymore? Perhaps on a grand scale but for the average website? Also, what do you think of the number for “Number of plugin function calls: 4,835 average“. Does that seem like a lot to you?
I couldn’t help but notice the GoDaddy image at the bottom of the plugin screen. Sure enough, they were one of the contributors behind this plugin so I give them props for doing something legitimately cool with WordPress. I recommend running a number of auto scans during a 7 day period at different times of the day to get a good feel for which plugins are really the culprits for slowing down your site. After that, it’s your call on whether you want a faster website, or the functionality that the plugin provides.
Thanks Dave for the hat tip.
Posted in Plugins | Tagged charts, performance, Plugins |
By Jeffro on February 14, 2012
Oli of WPLift.com published 9 ways you can make money via WordPress. None of the items on his list caught me by surprise. The question is, are there any methods of generating income via WordPress that he missed? ∞
Posted in News | Tagged revenue, wordpress, wplift |
By Jeffro on February 14, 2012
Ingenesis has announced the release of version 1.2 of their commercial e-commerce plugin. 1.2 is being considered a major upgrade as the release contains around 1,000 revisions with 300 bug tickets being squashed. Because of the amount of changes involved between 1.1 and 1.2, they are advising that you take all the precautions necessary before upgrading such as backing up your website data. Thankfully, the guys have created a best practices guide for upgrading as well as a list of template changes.
Haven spoken to John Dillick, Jonathan Davis and some other members of the Shopp team in person on numerous occasions, I can assure you that they take great pride in trying to produce the best shopping cart experience for WordPress. Congrats to the team on your 1.2 release.
Posted in Plugins | Tagged ecommerce, releases, shopp |
By Jeffro on February 13, 2012
ThemeSorter.com which I wrote about back in March of 2011 has turned one year old and thanks to AppThemes.com, they will be celebrating by giving away a few prizes. One of the prizes they’ll be giving away is an AppThemes club Developer membership valued at $349.00. All you have to do to enter is leave a comment on their celebration post explaining which AppThemes theme you are most interested in and how you would use it.
Congrats to them on not only sticking around for a year, but also for smashing their goal of 1,000 themes by the Summer of 2011.
Posted in News | Tagged giveaways, Themes, themesorter |
By Jeffro on February 13, 2012
Looks like Jane Wells is in the unique position to potentially purchase a bakery located in Tybee, Georgia. Imagine a location where you could go eat delicious WordPress inspired bakery items with free WiFi. Seems like a good idea to me. If you are familiar with Kickstarter, keep an eye on the following website, BuyJaneABakry.com as you’ll soon be able to help Jane crowdfund the down payment.
Posted in News | Tagged bakery, jane, wordpress |
By Jeffro on February 10, 2012
Alex who also goes by Viper007Bond has recently installed Limit Login Attempts on his personal blog because someone is trying to brute force their way into his site. I’ve mentioned this plugin before and his post reminded me that I should probably give you all an update as to the results I’ve seen over the past few months.
Since January 1st, 2012 there have been 75 email notifications sent to my inbox letting me know of an IP address that failed to login to the back-end of WPTavern three times in a row. In almost every case, the notifications look like the following with the IP address being different.
3 failed login attempts (1 lockout(s)) from IP: 78.29.15.137
Last user attempted: admin
IP was blocked for 20 minutes
There have only been a few times when Webmaster and even fewer with Jeffro as the attempted username. I receive multiple notifications every day with some spurts of 3-4 different IP addresses failing to login. I have no idea if these are real people or bots trying to login but thankfully, Limit Login Attempts is keeping me abreast of all the failed attempts. It’s definitely a plugin you should consider installing for the sake of monitoring the activity of failed login attempts. This is also a reminder that if you are using admin as your administrative username or have that username within the Administrator role, you’re begging for trouble.
Posted in Plugins | Tagged admin, limit, login, passwords, Plugins |
By Jeffro on February 10, 2012
Ian Stewart shared some of his predictions as they relate to WordPress themes for 2012. His thoughts on Lighter themes as well as themes getting rid of the useless options are spot on. It’s a trend that’s made headway since the beginning of 2012 and it will only continue during the rest of the year. I’m not quite sure about his thoughts on using the default theme that ships with WordPress because it gives you a 1,000 hour head start. I’m sure many will beg to differ but it’s a good trend to see that with each default theme, the team will be trying new ideas and hopefully, begin inspiring everyone else.
Amongst the comments, Josh Leuze proposed that themes should have less features built into them.
Along with less theme options it would be nice to see less features built into themes. There are so many themes out there with poorly implemented breadcrumbs, slideshows, and other functionality that doesn’t really need to be built in when there are so many awesome plugins they could integrate instead.
And with all the time they save by choosing established plugins instead of rolling their own, they can concentrate on sweet designs instead
With that being said, do you know of any themes that concentrate exclusively on providing a rich, beautiful presentation of content without all the doo dads attached onto it such as sliders, breadcrumbs, flashy headers, etc.? A theme that takes each post type and turns that piece of content whether it be a video, image, or blockquote into a thing of beauty. I’m willing to bet that most WordPress themes be it free or commercial do not accomplish that task out of the box. Instead, it seems like it takes a skilled designer or team of designers to turn a specific WordPress theme into a great presentation of content. However, the monkey wrench thrown into the equation is that themes are subjective and what looks great to one person may look like crap to someone else. If you can find a theme that accomplishes everything I’ve mentioned out of the box, I think that gets you closer to a 1,000 hour head start.
Posted in Themes | Tagged ian stewart, predictions, Themes |
By Jeffro on February 10, 2012
It was an idea that was proposed by Jeremy Clarke about a year ago and soon, that idea will be turned into a reality. His idea was to fix the image caption system to allow links within the caption area of images. It’s an idea that I support as I’ve mentioned in a previous post as the image caption serves as the perfect opportunity to provide attribution and is especially useful for the Image Post Type.
Ticket #18311 which centers around this functionality has been blessed and looks like it will be added to WordPress 3.4 if all goes well. Everyone interested in this feature should follow the progress made on the ticket as well as test the patch and last but not least, provide feedback.
Posted in WordPress | Tagged captions, features, functionality, images |
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