Looking back at 2009, I must say that it has been a rather successful year for me on all fronts. While I may not have achieved most of the goals I set for Techtites, it was definitely a lot better than 2008.

I have refrained from setting any goals for this blog, primarily because it serves as a personal blog.

At this time of the year, I normally make a very detailed post about my activities during the year. This year, I’ll refrain from a very detailed post and just make a short and sweet summary.

I began the year knowing that I had a good job in hand. I spent the first three months of the year completing my MBA. I joined the bank in early April and have slogged patiently and diligently over the last nine successful months.

I have also ensured that I continued making regular posts both at this blog and at Techtites during this duration. It’s a hobby that I have ensured that I have not given up, despite the long work hours.

On the coding front, I took over the development of Ajax Edit Comments in March from Ronald. Honestly, I didn’t make much progress on that front and a few months later, Ronald returned to continue the development of the best comment editing plugin for WordPress!

In December, Ajax Edit Comments became a premium plugin available to all users on a paid subscription basis. And, for a limited period you can get the basic subscription for only $10/year.

The downloads of my other plugins have also increased over the last year. I have released several updates to my plugins and my theme. I also plan on quite a few updates on both these fronts. I have had a few themes that I hoped to develop just lying around, so am hoping to finalise and release some of these.

And, lastly, the highlight of year 2009 without doubt was my engagement to Marise.

Looking forward, I hope and pray that 2010 turns out to be an even more successful year than 2009!

Visit: Techtites - Your Daily dose of all things tech!

• Fixed bug in themes where comments overlapped. Adding a tag fixed the issue
• Fixed a bug where timestamps weren’t being added to the feed properly. This issue has been fixed by checking if the content is a feed. If it is, the plugin won’t load

Read more about AEC or download the latest version.

Visit: Techtites - Your Daily dose of all things tech!

Ajax Edit Comments allows users and admins to edit comments on a post. Users can edit their own comments for a limited time, while admins can edit all comments.

The plugin has been tested on WordPress 2.8.5 as well. I have it running out here. If you notice any bugs, please report the same in the forum.

If I thought that Pune was bad with its power problems, then Bangalore has started to win! The compromise was that I had to work the whole of Sunday. The good part was I caught up on much needed sleep.

Vincent and me went over to the BSNL office in the afternoon to apply for a new broadband connection. Airtel turned out to be a really crappy alternative, when they found it “not feasible” to give us a new connection. We were surprised at the efficiency and speed of BSNL, which, despite being a government firm, has some very efficient staff.

Airtel has turned out to be a rather painful connection when I received a message a few days back billing me 50 bucks for downloading some game that I didn’t even know existed. Calling up the helpline is rather useless, nor is visiting their help center. I’ve been asked to check back on the day of the new billing cycle! I’m well aware of others in the past as well of being incorrectly billed by Airtel.

We had plans to catch the movie in the evening. However, before that we headed off to Garuda mall and spent sometime in the Barista out there. It has been a while since I went to a Barista and every time I go there, I realize that I prefer it anytime over Cafe Coffee Day. Will make sure I go off to a Barista when I go to Mumbai next.

We caught the movie at that place. 200 bucks was worth it for Transformers, however, it just isn’t fair when Marise watches it at half the price in Mumbai!

We headed home after the “late” night show and crashed rather immediately, since both Vincent and me had to go to work the next day. Spent a long long long week in office with several late nights. Friday was the only relatively light day.

Today was spent at home. The persons from BSNL came over today and fixed the phone line. The modem should be here in a few days and we’ll be hooked onto a 512kbps unlimited internet connection!

We initially at plans to go shopping, but laziness and sleep won over it. So, possibly next week, I’ll target a few shops that are offering sales.

Tomorrow shall be yet another lazy day. However, I do need to put in a few hours of work. May also work on some more of my WordPress plugins. I already released an update of Ajax Edit Comments today.

I’ve upgraded Mark’s plugin with an admin interface that lets you customize the maximum number of posts to display, the title of these posts. You can choose to include these automatically in the content of the post as well as in your feeds.

These will take a while to show up especially if the number of visitors is low.

Read more and download Where did they go from here?

If you have any ideas about what you would like to see in the plugin, do comment and let me know

Quick Links

Overview
Requirements
Features
Installing
Options
ChangeLog
To Do
Support the Development
License
Questions or Bugs
Languages
Download

More Plugins

Overview

Have you seen Amazon.com’s product pages? They all have a “Readers who have bought this, also bought. So, why not implement this on your WordPress blog?

This plugin will show “Readers who viewed this page, also viewed” links on your page.

How it works?

When a visitor views a blog post, the plugin checks to see if the referrer is another blog post on your site. If this is the case, then the referring post is updated with a reference to this post. And, the process continues as the visitor moves through the blog.

Thus, each post will display a list of links that other visitors went through from here. Hence, the name of the plugin!

You may wish to check out my other plugin Contextual Related Posts that finds related posts based on the content of your current post.

Features

• Display Related Posts automatically in content / feed, no need to edit template files
• Tracks visitors movement along your site
• You can manually add related posts where you want them displayed
• Exclude pages from the list of posts
• Display post thumbnails in the list. The plugin has support for WordPress 2.9 thumbnails, use of postmeta and also the ability to grab the first image in the post

Requirements

• WordPress 2.5 or above

Installing

1. Download Where did they go from here?.
2. Extract the contents of where-did-they-go-from-here.zip to wp-content/plugins/ folder. You should get a folder called where-did-they-go-from-here.
3. Activate the Plugin in WP-Admin.
4. Goto Options > Where go to configure.

Options

You can set the title of the posts. Default is <h3>Where did they go from here:</h3>


Enable / disable display of posts in content on single pages and / or in feed. If you don’t enable the first option, then you will need to add <?php if(function_exists('echo_ald_wherego')) echo_ald_wherego(); ?>.

By default, both options are enabled.

ChangeLog

• 1.4.2 – Fixed: language files were not being detected correctly. Added Italian translation.
• 1.4.1 – Fixed possible clash with other plugins
• 1.4
  • New: Implementation for tracking hits even on blogs with non-standard WordPress installs
  • New: Reset button to reset all browsing data
  • New: Option to exclude pages in post list
  • New: Choose if you want to blank out display or display a custom message
  • New: The plugin extracts the first image in the post and displays that if the post thumbnail and the post-image meta field is missing
  • Fixed: Postmeta detection for thumbnails
  • Some optimisation and code cleaning for better performance
• 1.3.1 – Fixed problem where plugin was not tracking visits properly
• 1.3
  • Added localisation support
  • Better support for blogs where wp-content folder has been moved
  • Added support for post thumbnails
  • Added option to display the post excerpt in the list
  • All parts of the list are now wrapped in classes for easy CSS customisation
  • Uninstall will clean up the meta tables
• 1.2.1 – Compatibility fix for WordPress 2.9
• 1.2 – Fix for blogs installed in a subdirectory
• 1.1
  • Compatible with caching plugins. Tweaks that should improve tracking.
  • Display the list of posts in Edit pages / posts of WP-Admin
  • Blanked out display when no related posts are found instead of #N/A
• 1.0 – Release

To Do

• Comment and tell me what you would like to see added to this plugin

Support the Development

Writing and testing plugins takes a good amount of time. If you like the plugin and find it useful and would like to donate something for my work please do click the Paypal Donate button below. The payment is secure. I haven’t filled in any amount. Feel free to donate what you please. Any amount is welcome. Thank you

License

All files and their contents are licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL).

Questions or Bugs

Known Bugs

If you have any questions or would like to report any bugs then please use the support forum.

Languages

The following translations are available:

• Italian by Gianni

If you would like to make available a translation for the plugin, please do drop me an email.

Downloads

Download Where did they go from here? v1.4.2
Number of downloads: 5,539
Rating: 5/5
Page on WP Extend

Anyway, I began with duplicating the original functionality of the plugin, however, ensuring that this strictly followed the latest Plugin API recommended by WordPress.

So, a few things that were changed / added were:

• The table to store the statistics now has the prefix (wp_) by default. So, if you have multiple blogs stored in the same database with different prefixes, this plugin will not mess up the stats.
• An options page to set the text you want displayed for the counter as well as for the popular posts
• Uninstall support so that all changes by the plugin are reversed on deletion from within WP-Admin. But, why would you?
• Ability to automatically add the viewed count to your single posts and pages.

Having all this in place, I ran a test on my blog Techtites and was pleased with the results, except for one major bottleneck. With WP Super Cache disabled the plugin tracked page views and displayed the counts correctly. However, the moment I enabled the cache the plugin would no longer update, and the page views were singe.

So, began the long and painful process of researching and figuring out how to bypass the cache. Well, to make a long story short, you can’t bypass the cache. However, what you can do is use JavaScript or AJAX for the same. Fortunately, the WordPress Codex has a well written article on using AJAX in Plugins. I was able to implement the same into the plugin.

This is where I would like to thank Thaya Kareeson for his help on the same. He kindly went through the code and helped me debug. We found out that the plugin counter updated properly. However, to display the count would require some more AJAX / JavaScript. Thaya is known for his super-awesome plugin WP Greet Box [my review on WLTC], which I have running on this blog as well as Techtites.

I finally decide to implement the count display using a mix of PHP and JavaScript. I’ll blog about this later today on Techtites (subscribe).

After some rigorous testing, I give you Top 10 – A Page Counter and Popular Posts plugin for WordPress.

So why don’t you download and install it on your blog. I have a lot of feature additions planned for this plugin and as usual I’m open to all suggestions and feature requests. Do comment here or on the plugin page directly with the same.

This should give you better results for the related posts, especially if you use titles that are not perfectly reflective of your post content. Thanks to Mick Dakota for the suggestion.

I recommend installing a caching plugin like WP Super Cache if you would like to enable this option.

If you installed 1.1, then please update to 1.1.1 as this fix the minor bug that made the plugin unusable.

I still have a few plans for this plugin, but am looking at recommendations from everyone to improve it.

I also have another plugin lined up which is currently undergoing rigorous testing.

Moderation Notify Author

The problem on multiple-author blogs running WordPress is that it doesn’t automatically notify the author of a post about waiting comments. Instead all comment moderation requests go to the admin.

This plugin will notify the author of the post in addition to the admin and thus allow the author to share the responsibility of moderating comments on his posts.

The plugin is smart enough to ensure that the admin does not get a duplicate email.

Running a multi-author blog? Read more and download Moderation Author Notify.

Contextual Related Posts

Checked out the Related Posts that you see at the bottom of this post?

This plugin will allow you to display a list of contextually related posts for the current post. The number of posts can be configured via the admin panel as well as the title you want to display before the list of posts.

You can also choose to automatically display the posts after the content of your post as well as in feeds. You can also choose to manually display the posts where you want.

The posts displayed are based on a “fuzzy” search and so will display related posts even for those with no tags.

Read more and download Contextual Related Posts

Both these plugins are running on Weblog Tools Collection as well as on Techtites. I have related posts here.

Like to see new features? Comment below or on their individual pages.

You can now choose to delete post revisions. Selecting this option will delete all post revisions in your WordPress database. Post Revisions were introduced in version 1.6 and in my opinion are absolutely useless unless you operate your blog as a wiki. But, do you?

I also fixed a minor bug where the scheduled cron was not deleted when you reset the plugin settings to default.

Lastly, the plugin now comes with its own uninstall code. Deleting the plugin from the Plugins screen of WP-Admin will delete all options from the database.

Existing users can upgrade the plugin from within WordPress Admin itself.

Read more about Auto-Close or directly download it from the plugin repository.