The description to David McNicol’s URL Cache Plugin raises more questions than it answers:

Given a URL, the url_cache() function will attempt to download the file it represents and return a URL pointing to this locally cached version.

Where did he plan to use it? Does he envision the cache as an archive, or for performance? Why hasn’t it been updated since 2005?

It caught my interest because I’ve long been interested in a solution to link rot in my blog. A real “perma-permalink” would be very useful.

The Hanzo Archives Wordpress plugin is something I’d be very excited to use. Ironically, it’s disappeared from the web (though the blog post hasn’t):

We’ve released a Wordpress Plugin which automatically archives anything you link to in your blog posts; it also adds a ‘perma-permalink’ for the archived version adjacent to each original link.

An Amazon Web Services case study put me on to Hanzo a while ago, and in May 2008 I actually spoke with Mark Middleton (the markm who posted the entry above). Mark revealed that community take-up on the plugin and other general purpose web archiving services was below expectations. The company has since refocused on legal matters (even their blog tag-line has changed to “web archiving for compliance and e-discovery”).

I wonder if, now that the number of people and companies that have been blogging for years has grown, there might be more of a market for such a service.

Lorelle is a big fan of Scott Reilly’s Customizable Post Listings:

Display Recent Posts, Recently Commented Posts, Recently Modified Posts, Random Posts, and other post, page, or draft listings using the post information of your choosing in an easily customizable manner. You can narrow post searches by specifying categories and/or authors, among other things.

This plugin is the next step after my proposal for a common invite API. Here’s how I described it when requesting hosting at the plugin directory:

A common framework for registering tickets that will be acted upon later. Use it to manage challenge/response interactions to confirm email addresses, phone numbers, IM screen names, Twitter accounts, etc. Build an invite system around it, or use it as the foundation of a short URL system. It’s an extensible framework that takes cues from WordPress’ cron and admin Ajax functions.

Tickets are unique 1-32 character strings associated with actions and some stored data. Upon receiving a ticket, the matching action is executed with the stored data as an argument. After receiving the action, a plugin can destroy the ticket (as for challenge/response actions), or or leave the ticket in place for repeated use (like redirecting to longer post permalinks for a short URL resolver).

Here’s how it works:

Registering a ticket requires three things:

• The unique string that identifies the ticket
• A string representing the action that will be executed when the ticket is called
• Some data that will be passed to that action when the ticket is called

And here it is in action:

$ticket = $wptix->register_ticket( 'action_name_string', $wptix->generate_md5(), array( 'data' => 'val', 'more_data' => 'another_val' ));

To actually do anything with that ticket you’ll have to also register a function associated with the action name you gave when you registered it:

add_action( 'action_name_string', 'my_function_name' );

WP Ticket Framework registers a URL base in the form of http://site.net/do/any_ticket_string, so you can call a ticket simply by visiting that URL, or you can call tickets within your code. The following demonstrates one method of handling ticket inputs as part of a larger form submission.

if( ( $ticket = $wptix->is_ticket( $_POST['phone_confirmation'] )) && $ticket->arg['user_id'] == $current_user->ID ){
 $wptix->do_ticket( $_POST['phone_confirmation'] );
}else{
 $errors->add( 'user_phone', __( "<strong>ERROR</strong>: The confirmation code is invalid." ), array( 'form-field' => 'phone_confirmation' ) );
 return;
}

Caveats:

• Tickets don’t have any built in expiration mechanism. You can, however, include an expiration time in data saved in the ticket and act on that accordingly.
• Tickets don’t have any built in security mechanism. If only a certain user should be allowed to call a ticket, your code needs to be aware of that and enforce it.
• Tickets are deleted after being called, though you can suppress that by calling $wptix->clean_up_after( FALSE );.
• Tickets can only be queried by ticket string. If your application needs to keep track of open tickets for each user (as an example) it should also make a user meta entry about it.

A few weeks ago I said I no longer needed the Wufoo embedding code that I’d put into bSuite. I was wrong. So I’ve taken another look, fixed the code from my old post, and coded it up into a stand-alone plugin. I’ve added installation and usage instructions to the bottom of the original post.

Perian: “The swiss-army knife of QuickTime components”

• File formats: AVI, DIVX, FLV, MKV, GVI, VP6, and VFW
• Video types: MS-MPEG4 v1 & v2, DivX, 3ivx, H.264, Sorenson H.263, FLV/Sorenson Spark, FSV1, VP6, H263i, VP3, HuffYUV, FFVHuff, MPEG1 & MPEG2 Video, Fraps, Snow, NuppelVideo, Techsmith Screen Capture, DosBox Capture

The LGPL-licensed QuickTime plugin installs easily on Mac OS X 10.5 and does what it promises. FLV videos (such as those you’d sneakily download from YouTube) open just like any other QuickTime vid, and you can easily export them to other types.

Installation

Simply download the plugin, place the entire folder in your WordPress /plugins/ folder, and activate.

Usage

It currently uses Clickatell’s gateway services, though more could be supported in the future. Once you get login credentials to Clickatell’s http gateway you can start sending messages easily.

Simply instantiate the class with your credentials:

$mysms = new wpSMS( $API_ID, $USERNAME, $PASSWORD );

Then send your message:

$mysms->send( $YOUR_MESSAGE, $TO_PHONE_NUMBER );

How you create the message or get the destination phone number is up to you.

Screenshots

• You’ve found an interesting book in our library, but who wants to write down the location and call number when you can text it to yourself?
  
• Clicking the “text this to me” link takes you to a screen where you preview the message and enter your mobile number.
  
• The received message includes all the details you need to find the book on the shelf.
  

I actually use Event Calendar, which has been abandoned for some time. Looking at the alternatives listed in the Plugin Directory, Calendar, Events Calendar, and Gigs Calendar add full calendar management features to WordPress. While ICS Calendar, iCal Events, and Upcoming Events, simply offer the ability to display calendar data from elsewhere.

What I liked about the old Event Calendar plugin is how events were posts. Creating an event started with creating a new post. Searching and browsing events was the same as for posts. I haven’t yet tried any of the alternatives, but if none of them treat events as posts, I may find myself re-working the old plugin for better compatibility with current WordPress.

Write excerpts, tag, and categorize your pages

WordPress excerpts are an underused but powerful feature that allow you to explain to your readers why they should read the page you wrote. Tagging and categorization of pages help improve the findability of those pages, especially in search engines. Native WordPress doesn’t support excerpts, tags, or categories for pages, but bSuite does. Whenever you edit a page you’ll see the same tools that you do when writing posts.

Automatically insert anchors in your page

There’s nothing wrong with long pages, but you can make it easier for your readers to navigate them by if you break it up into sections. When you use the innerindex shortcode, bSuite will insert an automatically index of all the headings (the h1 through h6 tags) in your page. This also works in regular blog posts.

Automatically list sub-pages

You can easily organize pages into any structure that suits your content, but having to manually manage all the links into that hierarchy can be tiresome. The list_pages shortcode solves that in a jiffy. Options to the shortcode allow you to set how deep the list is and other features.

Automatically list sub-pages with excerpts

One especially useful feature of the list_pages shortcode is the ability to include the excerpt from each of the listed pages. You can even put the innerindex shortcode in the excerpt (see that at work here).

CAS — Central Authentication Service — has no logo, but it’s still cool. Heterogeneous environments like mine offer hundreds of different online services or applications that each need to authenticate the user. Instead of throwing our passwords around like confetti, CAS allows those applications to identify their users based on session information managed by the CAS service. It also obviates the need for users to offer their credentials to potentially untrusted systems — think externally hosted systems.

So CAS is great, but what about WordPress integration? Andrej Ciho and Stephen Schwink both worked on the problem and were kind enough to share their solutions with the community. Now, building on their work, I’ve released the WordPress CAS plugin we’re using at Plymouth State.

It’s compatible with both regular WordPress and WordPress MU. You can configure it via a settings menu, or a conf file. And if the CAS user doesn’t exist in WordPress, the plugin can call a function you define to provision an account for them or do whatever you want. It’s written for easy maintenance — your configuration info won’t be lost if you svn up, for example — and convenience, but then, you also have to have a working CAS environment going before it’s useful.

Get my wpCAS WordPress CAS plugin, or read more. And here’s the announcement on CAS user mail list.

I announced the bSuite 4 public beta not long ago, now I’ve just posted a new version to SVN that addresses some of the bugs and fleshes out some of the features. I have yet to update the bSuite page, but here’s a preview of what’s new or changed:

• Additional stats reports
• WP2.5-style tag input tools on the Page edit screen*
• WP2.5-style category selector on the Page edit screen*
• WP2.5-style excerpt input on the Page edit screen*
• For multi-author sites: ability to grant edit permissions by role for each page (with a configurable default)
• An “include” shortcode that makes it easy to show content from one post or page on another.

About the new shortcode, use it like this:
[include post_id=“1234” url=“a url to a post or page in your blog” field=“post_excerpt”]

One of post_id or url is required; field is optional and defaults to post_excerpt first, then to post_content if there is no excerpt.

*Why would you want to input tags, set categories, or add an excerpt to a Page? They help readers find and explore our content. What’s so wrong with that?

I’ve had a lot of features on the table for bSuite for a while, but this recently discovered comment from John Pratt (whose Smorgasboard.net is a lot of fun), kicked me into gear to actually get working on it again. The result is bSuite 4, which is probably what bSuite 3 should have been all along.

The big news is that I’ve finally revamped stats tracking to work with caching mechanisms like WP Cache, WP Super Cache, Varnish, or whatever else. I’ve also got the search word highlighting working again, and that’s cache-friendly too. Yay for javascript, I say.

And in addition to making the stats cache-friendly, I’ve made them a little smarter, faster, and more useful. bSuite now tracks sessions, and reports both the number of page loads and the number of visitors to your site. To improve performance, stats are first recorded to a small table for incoming hits, then periodically processed (“migrated”) into the tables used to report stats. This reduces contention and improves write speeds for incoming stats hits.

The stats report now gets graphs for both the previous 24 hours and 30 days of activity. And because unlike external stats solutions, bSuite is integrated into your site, it can also report on your most popular tags and categories based on traffic.

I’ve also implemented a large number of improvements, bug fixes from the previous versions. Big thanks go to Matthew Batchelder (who helped with the javascript code), Jon Link (who both pointed out a lot of bugs in bSuite 3 and helped answer questions in the forums), Zach Tirrell (who helped develop migration strategy ages ago), and to everybody who’s posted a comment or review related to bSuite.

This is beta software, and some things definitely don’t work. The stats are working solidly, the other features appear free of catastrophic bugs, and I’ve had it running (in various stages of development) here at MaisonBisson for a month now. Still, read the warranty (there is none) and don’t blame me if Boba Fett jumps out of your server after installing it.

Get the details at the bSuite page, download bSuite 4beta1 here.

Thanks to Mike Giarlo’s unAPI Server for WordPress. Now if only there were a library catalog built on WordPress, I could probably just drop it in.

unAPI, wordpress, plugin

Work on bsuite3 is progressing well, thanks to help from Zach and Matt, who are collaborating with me on completely rearchitecting how stats are collected and reported. This, however, is not bs3. It’s a transitional release intended to fix some bugs in b2 and make upgrading easier. This upgrade is recommended for all current bsuite users and new users.

bsuite Features

• Tracks page loads (hits)
• Tracks search terms used by visitors ariving at your site via search engines
• Reports top-performing stories via a function that can be included in the sidebar
• Reports recent comments via a function that can be included in the sidebar
• Reports top search terms via a function that can be included in the sidebar
• Outputs a pulse graph of activity on your site or specific stories
• Lists related posts at the bottom of the current post’s content
• Suggests posts that closely match the search criteria for visitors who arrive via search engines
• Integrates bsuite_speedcache
• Does some stuff with tags

Fixed/Changed/Added

• As mentioned above, a huge-but-invisible feature here is that this version includes some pieces that will make it easy to transition to the new plugin.
• MySQL errors while creating the tables should now be fixed. It’s my shame that these have persisted so long.
• The plugin now “rebuilds the tags table” as soon as you activate it. This is a good thing, but if you’ve got a huge number of posts (or a really short max execution time) it might cause a problem (please leave a comment if it does).
• The related posts feature now works even if you aren’t tagging your posts. If there are no tags, the post’s title is used as a search string.
• This list is probably incomplete and in some other way inaccurate. It’s not intentional, I’m just sloppy. Please leave comments with bug reports or corrections, I’ll do what I can to fix them.
• Finally, I’m now hosting the download on a new server, so it won’t be subject to .Mac’s bandwidth consumption limits.

Installation

• Download and unzip bsuite.zip
• Place bsuite.php in you wp-content/plugins directory
• Place spacer.gif in your wp-content directory
• Log in to your WordPress admin panel and activate the plugin, then visit the new bsuite submenu of the options tab. This will allow bsuite to create its database tables.
• Stats collection will start automatically; you can see the results in the new bsuite Reports submenu of your Dashboard
• Once installed, be sure to enable the options and consider customizing the look by adding the bsuite CSS to your theme’s CSS (sample CSS here).
• In order to view the stats reports reports on your public pages, you’ll need to add the display functions to your pages.

Upgrading

• Upgrades from earlier versions of bsuite are easy, just replace the old bsuite.php file with the new one.
• Don’t forget to visit the bsuite submenu of the options tab so you can setup any new features.

Commands

The bsuite submenu of the options has a few command buttons:

• Clear bsuite_speedcache

  The cache improves performance, but can sometimes get stale before its time. This command clears it.

• Rebuild bsuite tag index

  bsuite maintains its tag index with every story edit. Use this command to bring old-content into the index or if you’ve edited the content in way WP doesn’t know about.

Options

The bstat submenu of the options tab has a few configurable settings:

• Minimum userlevel to view bsuite reports

  The options are restricted to administrators, but you can choose who can view the reports.

• Output default CSS

  Some of the bsuite functions require CSS styles not found in the average style sheet. This will output default styles.

• Default pulse graph style

  This sets how values are interpolated in drawing the pulse graph. Experiment with the options to see how they work.

• Suggest related entries in post

  This will insert a block of links at the tail of each (tagged) post’s content with links to related posts at your site.

• Tag input format

  Name your style: square brackets or angle brackets / <tags> or [tags].

• Highlight search words and offer search help

  The first part of this should be obvious, but the real trick here is using those search words to offer other related content from your site to visitors. It works (and looks) a lot like the option above, but the suggestions only appear when search words are detected.

• Filter incoming search terms using comment moderation and blacklist words

  Referrer spam is as much of a problem as trackback spam. There are a few tricks in bstat to prevent the problem, but here’s one you can configure. Selecting this option tells bstat to not display search terms that contain words in your moderation list or blacklist.

• Ignore hits from registered users at or above userlevel

  No author wants to skew their stats just by poking around their own site.

• Ignore hits from these IP numbers

  Sites with low traffic may find that activity by authors severely skews the stats tracking. Enter an IP address here to ignore it.

Tag Support

Until WordPress adopts a standardized way to manage tags, we’ll have to deal with things like this.

bsuite recognizes tags in three forms:

• Any link with a rel=“tag” attribute
• Any number of single tags like this: <tag>tag name</tag>
• A block of comma-delimited tags like this: <tags>WordPress, WordPress Plugin</tags>

This appears to make it compatible with a number of existing tag management strategies now in use — including those used by Ecto and SimpleTags.

Tags are mapped to Technorati, but a future version will include an option to set other tag resolvers.

Using bsuite Functions

Function usage is unchanged from the last version. Among the things at the top of the list for bs3: widgets.

Known Bugs

None yet, but I’m sure I’m forgetting something. Report what you find in the comments below.

Money Grubbing

bsuite is GPL-licensed free software, but after some urging by friends, I’m opening the tip jar. If you use it and like it, let me know. And if you feel moved, leave a tip in the jar.

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Update: bugfix release b2v7 available.

It’s been a while since I released a new version of bsuite, my multi-purpose WordPress plugin. I’d been hoping to finish up a series of new features, but those have been delayed and this is mostly just a collection of bugfixes. This update is recommended for all bsuite users.

bsuite Features

• Tracks page loads (hits)
   
• Tracks search terms used by visitors ariving at your site via search engines
   
• Reports top-performing stories via a function that can be included in the sidebar
   
• Reports recent comments via a function that can be included in the sidebar
   
• Reports top search terms via a function that can be included in the sidebar
   
• Outputs a pulse graph of activity on your site or specific stories
   
• Highlights search words used by visitors ariving at your site via search engines
   
• Lists related posts at the bottom of the current post’s content
   
• Suggests posts that closely match the search criteria for visitors who arrive via search engines
   
• Integrates bsuite_speedcache
   
• Does some stuff with tags

Fixed/Changed/Added

• The bsuite report consolidates the two uselessly differentiated top stories lists and adds a top movers list.
   
• The report also includes a hugely updated Quick Stats section listing today’s current tally and a prediction of the day’s total along with other goodies.
   
• The table definitions have been updated and optimized for better performance. Zach contributed some optimizations to the bstat_hitit() function and underlying MySQL queries, and you’ll also find a number of small code optimizations scattered throughout.
   
• This version finally creates and configures it’s tables automatically upon activation. You no longer need to visit the plugin’s option screen for this to happen.
   
• A fix to address a MySQL error for users running MySQL 5 has been long overdue. It’s in here.
   
• Numbers in the reports are now formatted with commas or whatever local format you’ve set MySQL for, using MySQL’s FORMAT() function.
   
• As requested, I’ve added a function — bstat_hits() — return just the hit count for a story or for the whole blog.
   
• As requested, you can now manually clear the bsuite_speedcache.
   
• As prompted, prodded, and cajoled, I’ve finally made a change to report hits to the front page (and other pages without post IDs).
   
• I did a bunch of thinking about tags a while ago, and bsuite now keeps an index of tags in a separate table. I’ve got plans to use this for later features, but for now it’s just a curiosity that shouldn’t cause any problems.
   
• You can now switch between <tags> or [tags] for compatibility with other plugins (such as noted here) and with WP2’s WYSIWYG editor.
   
• The code now properly calls get_settings(’siteurl’) instead of get_settings(’home’) to build the URL for the spacer.gif that builds the pulse graph, fixing the problem where the graph wouldn’t display for some users.
   
• Not changed, but at least answered: Eddie commented to explain that ‘–disable-bcmath’ can cause the undefined function errors some people were getting. A later release may incorporate Pramudita’s fix.
   
• Also not in this version are the user-contributed tag features I’d gotten so excited about. These just aren’t ready for primetime, but people who want to hack about in alpha-ville will find all the supporting code in there.
   
• This list is probably incomplete and in some other way inaccurate. It’s not intentional, I’m just sloppy. Please leave comments with bug reports or corrections, I’ll do what I can to fix them.
   
• Finally, I’m now hosting the download on a new server, so it won’t be subject to .Mac’s bandwidth consumption limits.
   

Installation

Update: bugfix release b2v7 available.

• Download and unzip bsuite.zip
   
• Place bsuite.php in you wp-content/plugins directory
   
• Place spacer.gif in your wp-content directory
   
• Log in to your WordPress admin panel and activate the plugin, then visit the new bsuite submenu of the options tab. This will allow bsuite to create its database tables.

  Stats collection will start automatically; you can see the results in the new bsuite Reports submenu of your Dashboard
   

• Once installed, be sure to enable the options and consider customizing the look by adding the bsuite CSS to your theme’s CSS (sample CSS here).

In order to view the stats reports reports on your public pages, you’ll need to add the display functions to your pages.

Upgrading

Upgrades from earlier versions of bsuite are easy, just replace the old bsuite.php file with the new one.

If you’re upgrading from bstat (which is so old I was tempted to remove this part of the docs), be sure to delete or deactivate the old plugin before activating the new one. Don’t forget to visit the bsuite submenu of the options tab so you can setup all the new features.

Commands

The bstat submenu of the options has a few command buttons:

• Clear bsuite_speedcache

  The cache improves performance, but can sometimes get stale before its time. This command clears it.
   

• Rebuild bsuite tag index

  bsuite maintains its tag index with every story edit. Use this command to bring old-content into the index or if you’ve edited the content in way WP doesn’t know about.
   

Options

The bstat submenu of the options tab has a few configurable settings:

• Minimum userlevel to view bsuite reports

  The options are restricted to users at userlevel 8 or above, but you can choose who can view the reports.
   

• Output default CSS

  Some of the bsuite functions require CSS styles not found in the average style sheet. This will output default styles.
   

• Default pulse graph style

  This sets how values are interpolated in drawing the pulse graph. Experiment with the options to see how they work.
   

• Suggest related entries in post

  This will insert a block of links at the tail of each (tagged) post’s content with links to related posts at your site.
   

• Tag input format

  Name your style: square brackets or angle brackets / <tags> or [tags].
   

• Highlight search words and offer search help

  The first part of this should be obvious, but the real trick here is using those search words to offer other related content from your site to visitors. It works (and looks) a lot like the option above, but the suggestions only appear when search words are detected.
   

• Filter incoming search terms using comment moderation and blacklist words.

  Referrer spam is as much of a problem as trackback spam. There are a few tricks in bstat to prevent the problem, but here’s one you can configure. Selecting this option tells bstat to not display search terms that contain words in your moderation list or blacklist.

• Ignore hits from registered users at or above userlevel

  No author wants to skew their stats just by poking around their own site.
   

• Ignore hits from these IP numbers.

  Sites with low traffic may find that activity by authors severely skews the stats tracking. Enter an IP address here to ignore it.

Tag Support

Until WordPress adopts a standardized way to manage tags, we’ll have to deal with things like this.

bsuite recognizes tags in three forms:

• Any link with a rel=“tag” attribute
   
• Any number of single tags like this: <tag>tag name</tag>
   
• A block of comma-delimited tags like this: <tags>WordPress, WordPress Plugin</tags>
   

This appears to make it compatible with a number of existing tag management strategies now in use — including those used by Ecto and SimpleTags.

Tags in <tag> and <tags> tags are mapped to Technorati, but a future version will include an option to set other tag resolvers.

Using bsuite Functions

Though many bsuite features require no coding or modifications to theme files, there are a number of public functions available to display lists of top stories, recently commented stories, recent comments, recent incoming search terms, etc. Most of these functions take similar arguments and output their results in similar ways.

Today’s Stats

• bstat_todaypop

  displays top stories for today only.
   

• bstat_todayrefs

  displays top incoming search terms for today only.
   

The functions bstat_todaypop and bstat_todayrefs each take the same arguments.

Usage:
bstat_todaypop({count}, “{before}”, “{after}”);

count is the total number of results to output
before is a string to output before each result
after is a string to output after each result

Example:

<h2>Today's Most Popular</h2>
<ul><?php bstat_todaypop(15, “<li>”, “</li>\n”); ?></ul>

Recent Stats

• bstat_recentpop

  displays top stories for the past x days. This function reveals more useful data on sites with low traffic, but is somewhat slower than bstat_todaypop.
   

• bstat_recentrefs

  displays top incoming search terms for the past x days. This function reveals more useful data on sites with low traffic, but is somewhat slower than bstat_todayrefs.
   

The functions bstat_recentpop and bstat_recentrefs each take the same arguments.

Usage:
bstat_recentrefs({count}, “{days}”, “{before}”, “{after}”);

count is the total number of results to output
days is the number of days back to look
before is a string to output before each result
after is a string to output after each result

Example:

<h2>Incoming Search Terms This Week</h2>
<ul><?php bstat_recentrefs(15, 7, “<li>”, “</li>\n”); ?></ul>

Recent Discussion

• bstat_discussionbypost

  displays recently commented posts. Each post will appear only once.
   

• bstat_discussionbycomment

  displays recent comments (and commenter). Better on sites with lots of community interaction.
   

The functions bstat_discussionbypost and bstat_discussionbycomment each take the same arguments.

Usage:
bstat_discussionbypost({count}, “{before}”, “{after}”);

count is the total number of results to output
before is a string to output before each result
after is a string to output after each result

Example:

<h2>Incoming Search Terms This Week</h2>
<ul><?php bstat_discussionbypost(15, “<li>”, “</li>\n”); ?></ul>

Special Functions

• bstat_hits

  displays the current and average daily page loads.
   

Usage:
bstat_hits([{template}, [{post_id}, [{today_only}]]]);

template will be filled in with the appropriate values for %%hits%% and/or %%avg%%. If left blank, the default template is %%hits%% hits, about %%avg%% daily
post_id over-rides the detected post ID. Common values for this may include “0” to show stats for index pages, or “-1” to show stats for the entire blog (note that %%avg%% reports inaccurately with a “-1” value here)
today_only returns the count for today (note that %%avg%% doesn’t make much sense here)

Example:

<?php bstat_hits('%%hits%% hits, about %%avg%% daily') ?>

prints something like “791 hits, about 10 daily”

<?php bstat_hits('%%hits%% page loads today', -1, 1) ?>

prints something like “5,950 page loads today”

• bstat_pulse

  displays the “pulse” graph of hits over time.
   

Usage:
bstat_pulse([{post_id}, [{max_width}, [{display_text}, [{display_credit}, [{graph_accurate}]]]]]);

post_id is the post_id for the story, usually provided by a WP variable
max_width is the maximum width the graph maw run
display_text (acceptable values: 0 or 1), switch to display stats for total views and average views per day
display_credit (acceptable values: 0 or 1), switch to display “powered by bstat” credit
graph_accurate (acceptable values: 0 or 1), make smooth, accurate graphs or fuzzy (but not inaccurate) graphs

Example:

<h3>Story pulse</h3><?php bstat_pulse($id, 525, 1, 1, 1); ?>

• bstat_hitit

  The hamster on a wheel that makes it all work. It records hits for each page load, and hits for each incoming search term.
   

This function is no longer necessary, as it is executed automatically via a plugin hook that runs every time the footer is called. Still, it’s around if you have content that you want to track outside that scope.

Example:

<?php // this is how it used to work, but it's automated now...
	global $id;
    if (!is_single() && !is_page()) $id = 0;
	bstat_hitit($id, “read”);
	?>

note: (be careful of any “curly quotes” that might have been accidentally/automagically inserted in code samples)

Known Bugs

None yet, but I’m sure I’m forgetting something. Report what you find in the comments below.

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I’m not running it here (only because I’m too lazy), but I was happy to find Arne Brachold’s Del.icio.us – Bookmark this! WordPress Plugin. It puts a sweet Bookmark on del.icio.us link whereever you call this function: <?php dbt_getLinkTag(“Bookmark on del.icio.us”); ?>

Arne also wrote the Google sitemap plugin I use (though it turns out I’m a few versions behind).

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Update: bugfix release b2v6 available.

WordPress 2.0 is out and available for download now. I don’t know how the development team did it — I mean with the holidays and all — but here it is. And now I have to admit that I haven’t even played with the betas, so I’ve got no clue how bsuite works with the big 2.0. For all I know it works just fine, or it drops all your tables and sends your browser history to your mother, so please take caution.

But WP2 has a lot of things I want too, so I’ll be checking things out and making any necessary changes to bsuite as soon as possible.

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I’ve fixed another bug in bsuite b2, my multi-purpose plugin. This update is recommended for all bsuite users.

Fixed

• Previous versions would throw errors at the bottom of the page when the http referrer info included search words from a recognized search engine.
   

Installation

Follow the directions for the bsuite b2 release. The download link there will always fetch the current version.

Upgrades from earlier versions of bsuite are easy, just replace the old bsuite.php file with the new one. Upgrades from bstat follow the same directions as before.

bsuite Features

• Tracks page loads (hits)
   
• Tracks search terms used by visitors ariving at your site via search engines
   
• Reports top-performing stories via a function that can be included in the sidebar
   
• Reports recent comments via a function that can be included in the sidebar
   
• Reports top search terms via a function that can be included in the sidebar
   
• Outputs a pulse graph of activity on your site or specific stories
   
• Highlights search words used by visitors ariving at your site via search engines NEW!
   
• Lists related posts at the bottom of the current post’s content NEW!
   
• Suggests posts that closely match the search criteria for visitors who arrive via search engines NEW!
   
• Integrates bsuite_speedcache NEW!
   
• Does some stuff with tags NEW!

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I’ve fixed a couple bugs in bsuite b2, released last week.

Fixes

• A bug with search word highlighting that caused it to litter the display in some cases.
   
• A silly mistake of mine that cause a mysql error for some users.

Installation

Follow the directions for the bsuite b2 release. The download link there will always fetch the current version.

Upgrades from bsuite b2 are easy, just replace the old bsuite.php file with the new one. Upgrades from bstat follow the same directions as before.

bsuite Features

• Tracks page loads (hits)
   
• Tracks search terms used by visitors ariving at your site via search engines
   
• Reports top-performing stories via a function that can be included in the sidebar
   
• Reports recent comments via a function that can be included in the sidebar
   
• Reports top search terms via a function that can be included in the sidebar
   
• Outputs a “pulse” graph of activity on your site or specific stories
   
• Highlights search words used by visitors ariving at your site via search engines NEW!
   
• Lists related posts at the bottom of the current post’s content NEW!
   
• Suggests posts that closely match the search criteria for visitors who arrive via search engines NEW!
   
• Integrates bsuite_speedcache NEW!
   
• Does some stuff with tags NEW!

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bsuite highlights the search words used to find blog posts in Google and other search engines, and uses those search terms to recommend other related posts at your WordPress site.

— – —

bsuite uses the tags of one post to recommend related posts in your WordPress blog.

— – —

bsuite includes an easy to use statistics engine that tracks the daily hits to every post and page.

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The first thing we all have to agree on is that bsuite is the replacement for bstat. The name change reflects that fact that the plugin is doing a lot more than simply track page loads. The most exciting new feature is a module I can’t help but call bsuggestive. It uses the tags of the current post to suggest related posts to your readers. And when readers arrive at your site via a search engine, it not only highlights the search words they used, but offers a list of other posts matching their search criteria.

Why “b2″? I released b1 privately a while ago, and I’ve been running it here at MaisonBisson since September.

bsuite Features

• Tracks page loads (hits)
   
• Tracks search terms used by visitors ariving at your site via search engines
   
• Reports top-performing stories via a function that can be included in the sidebar
   
• Reports recent comments via a function that can be included in the sidebar
   
• Reports top search terms via a function that can be included in the sidebar
   
• Outputs a “pulse” graph of activity on your site or specific stories
   
• Highlights search words used by visitors ariving at your site via search engines NEW!
   
• Lists related posts at the bottom of the current post’s content NEW!
   
• Suggests posts that closely match the search criteria for visitors who arrive via search engines NEW!
   
• Integrates bsuite_speedcache NEW!
   
• Does some stuff with tags NEW!
   

Changes

This documentation supersedes any previous documentation.

I need to be honest, it’s been too long since the last public release for me to remember all the details. I haven’t really been keeping records on all this, so if you’ve been running the previous version and you discover a problem, please tell me about it.

The first change is that the plugin is now in a file named “bsuite.php”. As you install it you’ll need to deactivate the previous “bstat.php” version to avoid conflicts.

Another big change is that bsuite will now start tracking page loads as soon as it’s activated. You no longer need to put any code in your theme. But if you’re upgrading from a version where you already have that code in your theme, it also includes code to prevent it from double-counting any page loads.

The other functions from bstat b4 are all there, and I don’t believe there are any changes to the way they’re called.

The options submenu is almost entirely redesigned. It should be pretty self explanatory, but there’s documentation below.

Installation

Update: bugfix release b2v7 available.

• Download and unzip bsuite.zip
   
• Place bsuite.php in you wp-content/plugins directory
   
• Place spacer.gif in your wp-content directory
   
• Log in to your WordPress admin panel and activate the plugin, then visit the new bsuite submenu of the options tab. This will allow bsuite to create its database tables.

  Stats collection will start automatically; you can see the results in the new bsuite Reports submenu of your Dashboard
   

• Once installed, be sure to enable the options and consider customizing the look by adding the bsuite CSS to your theme’s CSS (sample CSS here).

In order to view the stats reports reports on your public pages, you’ll need to add the display functions to your pages.

Upgrading

If you’re upgrading from bstat, be sure to delete or deactivate the old plugin before activating the new one. And don’t forget to visit the bsuite submenu of the options tab so that it can create its new db tables.

Options

The bstat submenu of the options tab has three configurable settings:

• Minimum userlevel to view bsuite reports

  The options are restricted to users at userlevel 8 or above, but you can choose who can view the reports.
   

• Output default CSS

  Some of the bsuite functions require CSS styles not found in the average style sheet. This will output default styles.
   

• Default pulse graph style

  This sets how values are interpolated in drawing the pulse graph. Experiment with the options to see how they work.
   

• Suggest related entries in post

  This will insert a block of links at the tail of each (tagged) post’s content with links to related posts at your site.
   

• Highlight search words and offer search help

  The first part of this should be obvious, but the real trick here is using those search words to offer other related content from your site to visitors. It works (and looks) a lot like the option above, but the suggestions only appear when search words are detected.
   

• Filter incoming search terms using comment moderation and blacklist words.

  Referrer spam is as much of a problem as trackback spam. There are a few tricks in bstat to prevent the problem, but here’s one you can configure. Selecting this option tells bstat to not display search terms that contain words in your moderation list or blacklist.

• Ignore hits from registered users at or above userlevel

  No author wants to skew their stats just by poking around their own site.
   

• Ignore hits from these IP numbers.

  Sites with low traffic may find that activity by authors severely skews the stats tracking. Enter an IP address here to ignore it.

Tag Support

Until WordPress adopts a standardized way to manage tags, we’ll have to deal with things like this.

bsuite recognizes tags in three forms:

• Any link with a rel=”tag” attribute
   
• Any number of single tags like this: <tag>tag name</tag>
   
• A block of comma-delimited tags like this: <tags>WordPress, WordPress Plugin</tags>
   

This appears to make it compatible with a number of existing tag management strategies now in use — including those used by Ecto and SimpleTags.

Tags in <tag> and <tags> tags are mapped to Technorati, but a future version will include an option to set other tag resolvers.

Using bsuite Functions

Though many bsuite features require no coding or modifications to theme files, there are a number of public functions available to display lists of top stories, recently commented stories, recent comments, recent incoming search terms, etc. Most of these functions take similar arguments and output their results in similar ways.

Today’s Stats

• bstat_todaypop

  displays top stories for today only.
   

• bstat_todayrefs

  displays top incoming search terms for today only.
   

The functions bstat_todaypop and bstat_todayrefs each take the same arguments.

Usage:
bstat_todaypop({count}, "{before}", "{after}");

count is the total number of results to output
before is a string to output before each result
after is a string to output after each result

Example:

<h2>Today's Most Popular</h2>
<ul><?php bstat_todaypop(15, "<li>", "</li>\n"); ?></ul>

Recent Stats

• bstat_recentpop

  displays top stories for the past x days. This function reveals more useful data on sites with low traffic, but is somewhat slower than bstat_todaypop.
   

• bstat_recentrefs

  displays top incoming search terms for the past x days. This function reveals more useful data on sites with low traffic, but is somewhat slower than bstat_todayrefs.
   

The functions bstat_recentpop and bstat_recentrefs each take the same arguments.

Usage:
bstat_recentrefs({count}, "{days}", "{before}", "{after}");

count is the total number of results to output
days is the number of days back to look
before is a string to output before each result
after is a string to output after each result

Example:

<h2>Incoming Search Terms This Week</h2>
<ul><?php bstat_recentrefs(15, 7, "<li>", "</li>\n"); ?></ul>

Recent Discussion

• bstat_discussionbypost

  displays recently commented posts. Each post will appear only once.
   

• bstat_discussionbycomment

  displays recent comments (and commenter). Better on sites with lots of community interaction.
   

The functions bstat_discussionbypost and bstat_discussionbycomment each take the same arguments.

Usage:
bstat_discussionbypost({count}, "{before}", "{after}");

count is the total number of results to output
before is a string to output before each result
after is a string to output after each result

Example:

<h2>Incoming Search Terms This Week</h2>
<ul><?php bstat_discussionbypost(15, "<li>", "</li>\n"); ?></ul>

Special Functions

• bstat_pulse

  displays the "pulse" graph of hits over time.
   

Usage:
bstat_pulse([{post_id}, [{max_width}, [{display_text}, [{display_credit}, [{graph_accurate}]]]]]);

post_id is the post_id for the story, usually provided by a WP variable
max_width is the maximum width the graph maw run
display_text (acceptable values: 0 or 1), switch to display stats for total views and average views per day
display_credit (acceptable values: 0 or 1), switch to display “powered by bstat” credit
graph_accurate (acceptable values: 0 or 1), make smooth, accurate graphs or fuzzy (but not inaccurate) graphs

Example:

<h3>Story pulse</h3><?php bstat_pulse($id, 525, 1, 1, 1); ?>

• bstat_hitit

  The hamster on a wheel that makes it all work. It records hits for each page load, and hits for each incoming search term.
   

This function is no longer necessary, as it is executed automatically via a plugin hook that runs every time the footer is called. Still, it’s around if you have content that you want to track outside that scope.

Example:

<?php // this is how it used to work, but it's automated now...
	global $id;
    if (!is_single() && !is_page()) $id = 0;
	bstat_hitit($id, "read");
	?>

note: (be careful of any "curly quotes" that might have been accidentally/automagically inserted in code samples)

Known Bugs

The search word highlighting routine seems to still be buggy. Expect it to mis-recognize referrers, and one tester reported that it caused content not to display. Go ahead and enable it to see how cool it will be in b3, when it works, but I suggest disabling it for the moment.

Ryan Eby reminded me that I use a whole bunch of short PHP open tags (”<?” where I should have used “<?php”).

Zach pointed out that I’ve been sort of sloppy about using double-quotes where I should use single quotes and not single-quoting my array indices. All of this can add up to an unnecessary performance hit for high traffic sites (30,000 + daily page loads).

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bsuite, the follow-up to bstat, now includes a module called “bsuggestive” that recommends related posts based on the current post’s tags or alternate posts based on your search words when you arrive from a recognized search engine.

That is, bsuggestive does two neat things:

First, visitors will see a section in each post with links to other posts on your site that have similar content. The “similarity” is judged by comparing the current posts tags against the content and titles of all other posts in the database. This requires tags, and I’ll explain that later.

Second: visitors who arrive at your site from a search engine will see a list of other posts that closely match the original search words used at that search engine. This is especially helpful when people arrive at your front page or an archive page that may include a number of posts not related to the search query.
The big downside to all of this is that it (at least part of it) requires tags, and there’s no standardized support for tags in WordPress.

What to do? Easy: bsuite automatically recognizes any links with a rel=“tag” attribute as a tag. A little iffy: bsuite has adopted the simpletags approach to tagging. This is “iffy” because you should disable the simpletags plugin if you’re already using it (running both will needlessly increase CPU usage, but won’t do anything “bad”).

tags: bstat, bsuite, content tagging, plugin, related content, tag, tag management, tagging, tags, wordpress, wordpress plugin

[[pageindex]]

About

“Blogging” typically connotes short-form writing that needs little internal structure, but that’s no reason to cramp your style. As people start to explore WordPress’s Pages feature, it seems likely that we’ll need a way to structure content within posts or pages sooner or later. That’s why I’m working on bsuite_innerindex.

It’s a WordPress Plugin that puts named anchors on all of the <h1>, <h2>, <h*>-tagged content, and builds a list of links to those anchors that can be inserted anywhere on the page. An example can be seen in this post, and in the old bstat Beta 4 announcement.

Usage

Step 1
Write a post or page as usual, inserting <h*> tags where you normally would.

Step 2
Add this token somewhere in your page or post: [[pageindex]] That token will be replaced with the generated index. Why not just insert the index at the top of the page? Because it’s your document and you might want to put it elsewhere, like after the introduction or executive summary. But just remember to insert the token, because it won’t put the index anywhere if you don’t.

Installation

Step 1
Download: bsuite_innerindex.zip

Step 2
place unzipped “ bsuite_innerindex.php” file in your wp-content/plugins folder and activate it via the WP control panel. See the WordPress Codex for more detail.

Notes & Caveats

This is the first beta release of this plugin. I don’t see how it could break anything, but what do I know. Don’t blame me for loss, damage, or bad presidents. Please report bugs and/or suggestions in the comments.

anchors, blogging, bsuite, bsuite plugins, bsuite_innerindex, document structure, hack, innerindex, named anchor, page anchor, plugin, structured content, wordpress, wordpress plugin, wp, wp plugin

I’m a big fan of the WP Geo plugin, but I want more.

My biggest complaint is that I want to insert coordinates using Google Maps or MultiMap URLs, rather than insert them in the modified story editor. So I wrote a bit of code that reads through the URLs in a post, finds the “maps.google” or “multimap.com” URLs, fishes the latitude and longitude out of them, and adds some geocoding tags to the body of the post.

Take a look at how it works with these posts in my archive…

You should see one or more blocks of links like the following (from my Osceola Weekend post):

geolocation: geo:lat=44.006336, geo:lon=-71.547260, geotagged, geolocation:44.006336,-71.547260 geobloggers

Go ahead and click the “geobloggers” link. I could have added these links using the old Geo plugin, but I still would have had to insert the coordinates separately. Actually, that brings up a good point: my code also inserts post metadata in the same format the Geo plugin uses, so I can take advantage of all the good functions it has, like the one that inserts the “<meta name=“ICBM” content=“44.006336, -71.547260” />” tag in the header of this post (caveat: I had to disable the add_action code in Geo that feeds the postmeta table, as it was conflicting my code).

I’m releasing this now, to start some public discussion, but please recognize that it’s a very early beta.

Download: bsuite_geocode.zip
Install: place unzipped “bsuite_geocode.php” file in your wp-content/plugins folder and activate it via the WP control panel. See the WordPress Codex for more detail.
Use: write posts as usual, adding links to Google Maps or MultiMap as appropriate. Links to those sites that have latitude and longitude components will be used to geocode the post.

Example of a working URL:

http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=19.355507,-155.072365&spn=.191780,.318003&t=k&hl=en

Example of a URL that won’t work (note how there’s no “ll=”):

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=decker+canyon+rd,+malibu+california&spn=0.019857,0.039750&hl=en

I’ve got a lot of features and uses in mind, so consider this only a start. Please post bugs and suggestions in the comments.

Also, see these previous posts on geolocating the news or geolocating everything or just search the archives to understand why I’m so excited about things like this.

tags: beta, blog, blogmap, blogmaps, blog gis, geo, geocoding, geolocation, geotagging, gis, google maps, lat, latitude and longitude, lon, map, maps, mapping, metadata, multimap, plugin, plugins, wordpress, wordpress plugin, wp plugin

It looks like bstat has been localized for Japan! With that in mind, I’d love to hear from international users about what I can do to make localization easier. There will be some big changes in the transition to bsuite, and it might be a good time to make sure I’m properly supporting WP’s translation tables and localization features.

tags: bstat, bsuite, japanese localization, language, language translation, localization, localization features, plugin, translation tables, wordpress, wordpress plugin