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 >

I booked my tickets to come to Mumbai last month, when my plans for a trip to the USA and Canada fell apart due to my crazy work schedule.

My past two trips have been on British Airways, but this time I booked tickets for our very own Jet Airways. I booked a cab to the airport and reached Heathrow Terminal 4 with time to spare. I must admit that I missed the awesomeness of Terminal 5.

The flight was very comfortable, though I did feel the service was all over the place. The flight was a good 10 hours with minimal turbulence and I did catch up on some sleep and three movies, viz. The Lincoln Lawyer, Rio and Pay Check.

I prefer landing at Mumbai Airport over any other airport in India because of the really quick immigration counters. During my last trip to Bangalore Airport, I spent a good amount of time waiting to get through immigration and then had to wait for my baggage. This time it was only the wait for the baggage that I had to handle. What can be improved is the pre-paid taxi desk at which I had to wait nearly 20 minutes.

Now, I need to book tickets for my trip to Mumbai in December. And, the prices are already over the roof!

I began my trip in Mumbai by going for Sunday mass in my church. It sure has been a while… Sunday continued to be a very quiet day with me spending the rest of the day at home.

August 15 is the Feast of Annunciation of Mother Mary as well as India’s Independence Day which we love to celebrate The day began quietly with mass in the morning and lunch at home. Mom and me went over to my Grandmas place. I also met up with Cloreisha after a long long time at Mocha Mojo in Bandra. Mocha’s definitely has a whole new atmosphere now that hookahs have been banned in Mumbai. Another stupid rule after the "no serving alcohol to persons below 25". I am waiting for Starbucks to set up shop in Mumbai.

Dinner was back at my Grandma’s place, who is always enthusiastic to order in! So, I had my first taste of Indian Chinese cuisine after a long time.

I celebrated my 29th birthday on August 16. This time it was a lot different from the years before. Last year, I had a very sad birthday stuck at work till 2am. This time was a lot different. I brought in the day with true geek style by redesigning this blog. I have a bit more website and WordPress work to do in the next two weeks.

Birthday lunch was with Ramya at Global Fusion in Bandra which is a place I will definitely recommend. The prices are a bit on the higher side and the place only has buffet. But, the food was really amazing and the ambience is pretty good.

Next stop was to buy me lots of really cool gifts at Shopper’s Stop. I was definitely disappointed because I didn’t find anything good at the sale. Managed a pair of jeans and some good Adidas deo, but the place was rather dry. I plan on visiting the one at Irla to see if I can find something good.

Spent the rest of the day at my Grandma’s place followed by dinner at home. A quiet, uneventful day to celebrate my birthday.

Yesterday and today have been quiet days with some bank work that didn’t happen and an internet connection that didn’t work and lots and lots of rains!

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

After many many months, I have finally updated one of my WordPress plugins.

Where did they go from here has been updated to v1.5

Changes:

• Fixed: Compability problem with WordPress blog in the subdirectory
• Added: Option to excludes posts from certain categories to be displayed

If you’re a translator and interested in translating this plugin into different languages, do drop me an email.

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!