Here’s wishing all my readers and plugin users a Merry Christmas!

And, as my Christmas gift to you all, I have released v1.8 of Top 10. This version is a relatively large update with major reason being better thumbnail support. I have also cleaned up the code a bit and included some minor adjustments that should make your mySQL server happy (especially if you do not display excerpts).

The main changes are thanks to code from Daedalon.

Changes

• Added: Support for Video Thumbnails plugin
• Added: Thumbnail settings now reflect max width and max height instead of fixed width and height
• Added: Option to display thumbnails before or after the title
• Added: Option to not display thumbnails instead of the default thumbnail
• Added: Counts are now neatly formatted with commas
• Modified: Minor tweaks to improve performance

As usual, you can grab Top 10 from its WordPress page or if you’re already a user, you can update it from within your WordPress admin area.

I released a minor update to my related posts plugin Contextual Related Posts.

Display a list of contextually related posts for the current post. You can select the number of posts to display and if you want to automatically display the related posts in your content / feed.

Changes:

• Fixed: Few code tweaks to optimise mySQL performance
• Added: Dutch and Spanish language files

The mySQL tweaks are courtesy Mike Schroder, who contacted me with some key ways to optimise the mySQL query lookups. With these changes, the plugin should be a lot lighter on your mySQL databases especially if you got tonnes of posts and content.

I have also added in the Dutch and Spanish translations to this release. The current set of translations include:

• Danish by Team Blogos
• Dutch by WPwebshop
• Italian by Gianni
• Spanish by Octavio

Read more about Contextual Related Posts »

TwitterCounter plugin has been updated to v1.5. The plugin allows you to integrate TwitterCounter.com badges on your blog.

Changes:

• Added: Twitter Button with Photo
• Modified: Better compatibility with the latest versions of WordPress. If you are using the sidebar widgets, please re-add them to your theme under Appearance > Widgets
• Modified: Twitter Widget has been renamed to Twitter Widget

Read more and download TwitterCounter >

After a long long time, I have updated my plugin Top 10. The plugin is a powerful way to track daily and total visits on your blog posts and display the count as well as popular posts.

v1.7 is a much needed updated at includes better support for WordPress 3.x. Main changes include:

• Added: Excludes posts in the top lists from select categories
• Modified: Performance improvements
• Modified: Better compatibility with the latest versions of WordPress. If you are using the sidebar widgets, please re-add them to your theme under Appearance > Widgets

If you have been using an older version of the plugin, I suggest upgrading to v1.7 mainly due to the performance improvements. I have a few updates that I’d like to test out to improve performance still further, especially on heavy traffic blogs.

There are also several features that I intend to add in as time permits.

If you are already a user of the plugin, you can upgrade it directly from your Plugins page in WP-Admin.

Read more and download Top 10

I’ve had this lying around for more than a week checking the performance on my demoblog. And I guess it is time to be unleashed into the wild. I’ve just updated Top 10 to v1.6.2

WordPress doesn’t count page views by default. Top 10 will count the number of page views on your single posts on a daily as well as overall basis. You can then display the page view count on individual posts and pages as well as display a list of most popular posts based on page views.

Includes a sidebar widget to display the popular posts. And, all settings can be configured from within your WordPress Admin area itself! You can choose to disable tracking of author visits on their own posts.

Changelog:

• Fixed: Multiple rows being created for same ID
• Fixed: Counter display
• Added: New button to clear the duplicate rows in the tables
• Fixed: Top 10 should be lighter on the server now

I was going through a rather interesting post that Jeff made on WP Tavern. There has been a lot of discussion about credit links in plugins and themes. While themes have been more painful due to the links being misused for sponsored links.

Both Contextual Related Posts and Top 10 have credit links, where I provide the user the option to turn off the credit link. In this version of both these plugins I have changed the default option to off. This means that the plugins on first installation will no longer link back to my site.

However, this option will not change if you upgrade. So, you’ll need to manually turn it off if you don’t want the link.

Again, need I say that I would highly appreciate if you turn on the option. Alternatively, if you’re using the plugin, can I ask you to make a post on what you like about it?

Top 10:

WordPress doesn’t count page views by default. Top 10 will count the number of page views on your single posts on a daily as well as overall basis. You can then display the page view count on individual posts and pages as well as display a list of most popular posts based on page views.

Contextual Related Posts:

Display a list of contextually related posts for the current post. You can select the number of posts to display and if you want to automatically display the related posts in your content / feed.

I’m still looking for translators for both these plugins. If you are interested in translating this plugin, please do contact me.

I’ll also be releasing an update to Where did they go from here? sometime this week with similar changes.

Just pushed through an update of my Top 10 plugin

WordPress doesn’t count page views by default. Top 10 will count the number of page views on your single posts on a daily as well as overall basis. You can then display the page view count on individual posts and pages as well as display a list of most popular posts based on page views.

Changes:

• Added: Added support for excerpts and detection of first image in the post
• Added: Daily posts are tracked using the blog time instead of server time
• Fixed: On the first visit, display 1 instead of 0
• Fixed: Fixed uninstall script

To do:

I still have a few features that I plan to add to this plugin

• Popular posts by comments
• Better support for non-standard installs where the plugin directory has been moved
• Tracking unique visits only

Visit Top 10 – A Page Counter and Popular Posts plugin for WordPress

When I wrote Light weeks, these past two weeks has been, I was well aware that this was a temporary situation. And I wasn’t “disappointed”. I’ve been slogging it out for the past three weeks with life peaking last week.

While I worked from home two weekends back, I spent almost whole of last weekend in office. Thankfully, I enjoy my job, otherwise, I would have gone crazy.

I did manage to find some time to release a few updates to my plugins.

And, then I woke up last week to find out that PayPal has stopped personal payments to India.

And, the worst part is that all this is without warning. Now, I’m not really sure as to why this has been implemented. But, according to PayPal, they are waiting for some of their “business partners” to approve.

While we can still receive and send payments as “goods”, I find this entire workaround really stupid. And, once again we see PayPal’s lack of professionalism.

As for me, now I have to patiently wait it out and see what happens with PayPal. Unfortunately for them, I see a major move away from all parties, since we Indians form a really big part of the internet!

Just released two bug fix updates for two of my plugins:

Top 10

Track daily and total visits on your blog posts and display the count as well as popular posts.

Contextual Related Posts

Display a list of contextually related posts for the current post.

Changes to Contextual Related Posts:

• Fixed: Custom output was not detecting styles properly
• Fixed: Incorrect XHTML code was being generated when using special characters in the post title
• Added German translation

Changes to Top 10:

• Added: You can now use HTML in the counter display

Am extremely pleased to announce a major upgrade to Contextual Related Posts

Display a list of contextually related posts for the current post. You can select the number of posts to display and if you want to automatically display the related posts in your content / feed.

Changes:

• 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
• New: Display excerpts in the list
• New: Credit link to the CRP page added. You can choose to turn this off, though I would appreciate if you leave it on.
• Updated: All parts of the list are now wrapped in classes for easy CSS customisation

If you are using this plugin, please do consider a donation towards its development.

Read more and download Contextual Related Posts