The Blog Herald
Now Reading
WordPress Wednesday News: Automattic Stats WordPress Plugin Released, Twitter Plugin and Global Translator Updated, and Lots of WordPress Tutorial Videos
The Blog Herald
The Blog Herald

WordPress Wednesday News: Automattic Stats WordPress Plugin Released, Twitter Plugin and Global Translator Updated, and Lots of WordPress Tutorial Videos

by
May 9, 2007

The WordPress.com blog statistics feature is now available for full version blogs. WordPress.com blogs are almost numbering 1 million. The Twitter WordPress Plugin and Global Translator Plugin have been updated, as have many popular WordPress Plugins in preparation for the next WordPress release coming soon. And it’s time to start exploring WordPress tutorial videos.

WordPress News

WordPress.com Stats Released as Full WordPress Plugin: The WordPress.com bloggers have been having fun with their blog stats and it has now been released at the Automattic Stats WordPress Plugin for full version WordPress blogs (download). Andy Skelton explains how it works and the following are reviews and comments about the new Plugin: Pronet Advertising, Andy Skelton, Max Limpag, LiewCF, Blogger Design, WordLog, and others.

Getting a WordPress.com API Key: If you want to use comment spam fighting WordPress Plugin, or the new Automattic Stats WordPress Plugin, you will need a WordPress.com API key. To get one, you can use the WordPress.com Signup as a global user or to get your own free WordPress.com blog. If you want to support Akismet and WordPress and are a commercial blogger or user, then you can also get the paid version of the WordPress.com API key. After registering, the API key will be emailed to you, and you can also find it on your WordPress.com Global Dashboard under Profile.

WordPress – Most Popular Blog Software on the Planet: In Open Source Web CMSes by Taniwha, WordPress gets high marks in the reviews with “it must be the most popular (and well respected) blog software on the planet.”

WordCamp 2007 – July 21-22: will be July 21-22 in San Fransisco at the Swedish American Hall on Market Street. More info due soon.

Great WordPress Resources: Essential Keystrokes – List of Favorite WordPress Resources and Healthy Web Design’s Ultimate WordPress Resource Guide are noteworthy listings of links, podcasts, and videos to help you find more information on how to use WordPress.

Among the resource lists was a link to WordPress-related videos on YouTube that might be worth checking out. With all these helpful WordPress Videos, I thought I’d start featuring some here.

WordPress Videos: Finding the most popular or highest rated videos in YouTube on WordPress is very difficult. Their categorization is really poor. Even so, starting this week, I will feature a few videos from YouTube about using WordPress or WordPress.com. If you have any recommendations, please let me know:

Your Ideas Wanted!: Do you have a suggestion to improve WordPress? Or want to vote on one you think is a must-have for WordPress users? Have your say on the , or at least vote one way or another to support or defeat an idea for a new and/or improved feature.

WordPress.com News

WordPress.com W logoOne Million Blogs on WordPress.com: The count is now at 943,918 blogs on WordPress.com with one million going to turn over any time. Do you have any predictions?

Referrer Parser: Engtech has developed a 7 day Referrer Parser for WordPress.com blogs you can download and run with perl. It uses the referrer logs to generate statistics and graphs to help you track your referrers or to post on your blog.

What’s Hot on WordPress.com? The hottest blogs on WordPress.com were:

  1. I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER?
  2. The Browser: Analyzing the tech biz
  3. 38 Pitches
  4. Loser with Socks
  5. tnkgrl Mobile
  6. Web Worker Daily
  7. Scobleizer
  8. Berkeley Place
  9. Random Technology Agitator
  10. Random Technology Agitator

The hottest blog posts on WordPress.com were:

  1. Report: MySpace snaps up Photobucket
  2. OQO Model 02 HSDPA mod: Part 1
  3. Fountains Of Wayne Sing With Neil Sedaka
  4. Joey Barton to add steel to a flamboyant midfield?
  5. Starbucks’ Pushy New Neighbor
  6. 5 Ways to Multitask Productively… Using Email!
  7. The Bug: Steampunk Computer Mouse
  8. Some of the best talks ever given
  9. Wonderful animation that explains how neurons work
  10. A complete list of web design galleries

WordPress Plugins and Themes News

WordPress Plugins DatabaseGlobal Translator WordPress Plugin Updated: According to Quick Online Tips, the popular Global Translator WordPress Plugin has been updated, fixing many recent problems. It now uses either or both of the Google Translation or the Babelfish Translation Engines and now has improved caching and the option of DIVs or table layout.

Feedburner WordPress Plugin now FeedSmith: The popular Feedburner WordPress Plugin is now under the roof of Feedburner and is called FeedSmith. It has a lot of new features to grab all calls to your built-in WordPress feeds and divert them to Feedburner. Currently, this is only for full version WordPress users, though many WordPress.com fans would love a Feedburner option.

Prevent Hotlinking: The Hotlink Protection Plugin for WordPress is a new Plugin designed to stop folks from hotlinking to your blog’s images and files while allowing the images to pass through to your feed readers.

Widgets are Wonderful: Blogopreneur offers “5 Great Reasons to Use WordPress Sidebar Widgets”, which is a good reminder to WordPress Theme authors to widgetize your WordPress Themes and WordPress Plugin authors to think “Widgets”.

New Copyright WordPress Plugin: Plagiarism Today reviews the Copyfeed WordPress Plugin, a Plugin designed to help stop scrapers and splogs from abusing your feeds. It adds a copyright notice, digital fingerprint, and “magically” displays the IP address of the computer they used to scrape the feed, which can be used in conjunction with the Antileech WordPress Plugin to redirect any attempts by that scraper to grab your content in the future. It’s still in its early stages, and doesn’t play well with FeedBurner, but expect it to grow into a fierce fighter against splogs and scrapers.

Stock Market Plugins Updated: Stock Quote Tooltip and Stock Quote Sidebar WordPress Plugins have been updated for those who enjoy tracking the stock market on your blogs.

Alex King’s Twitter Tools Updated: If you are still twittering, Alex King’s Twitter Tools 1.0 has been updated and continues to be one of the hottest Twitter WordPress Plugins around. It allows you to archive your Twitter tweets and create a blog post from each of your tweets, or a daily digest post. You can feature your posts in your blog’s sidebar and even post your tweets through the WordPress Administration Panels.

Devlounge – How to Write WordPress Plugins Series: has started a series on how to write WordPress Plugins. The first two articles are out: How to Write a WordPress Plugin – Introduction and Seven Reasons to Write a WordPress Plugin.

Weblog Tools Collection – One Plugin a Day: Weblog Tools Collection featured “A Plugin A Day” through April and has decided to continue their “APAD” through May. Excellent!

World of Warcraft WordPress Theme: The Wowza 2.0 – World of Warcraft WordPress Theme has been updated for fans of World of Warcraft.

Most Popular WordPress Themes: The WordPress Theme Viewer now features 2,683 Themes and 4,160,680 Themes downloads. The top WordPress Themes are:

  1. Vistered Little 1.6
  2. MistyLook 3.1
  3. WP-Andreas01 1.5
  4. Water 1.1
  5. ChaoticSoul 1.0
  6. Japanese Cherry Blossom 1.0
  7. Cordobo Green Park 0.9.2 BETA 12
  8. Mandigo 1.16
  9. Mesozoic 2.0
  10. Sky3c 2.0

WordPress Plugin Directory: The new WordPress Plugin Directory is going strong and improving as it develops. According to their list, the most popular WordPress Plugins downloaded are:

More WordPress Plugins can be found on the WordPress Plugins Database.

See Also
YouTube features for Content Creators
YouTube Plans to Sunset Stories: What’s Next for Content Creators?

WordPress Community News

WordPress Community graphicLooking for a WordPress Expert? Do you want a custom WordPress blog? Want to convert your website into a WordPress blog or use WordPress as a CMS? If you are looking for an expert in WordPress Themes, WordPress development, WordPress Plugins, or other WordPress-related expertise, check out the list of WordPress Consultants on , the parent company of WordPress, and the WP-Pro mailing list.

WordPress Installed For Free: If you have problems installing the full version of WordPress, visit Installing WordPress for Free (aka Install4Free WordPress). This free, volunteer-driven service is limited to personal blogs only, and they help only with installations, not upgrades.

WordPress Techniques and Tips

Know of any great WordPress tips and techniques articles? Let me know and it may end up on our weekly list.

More WordPress News

Akismet Scores! Matt Vapor reports “1,838 Spam Comments in 48 Days – Thanks Akismet WordPress Plugin!” in his announcement of the success of Akismet, the comment spam fighter for blogs, forums, and bulletin boards. He also points to TechCrunch’s claim that Akismet stopped over a million spam comments on their blog. To date, Akismet has blocked over 504,000 comment spams on . What about yours?

WordPress Events

The following are upcoming WordPress group meetings and meetups, and a few special blogging events you may want to attend. If you know of any I’ve missed, please post them or contact me on my WordPress Events Page.

The Melbourne Weblogger Meetup Group at Meetup.com With Darren Rowse and Alister Cameron in the planning stages. Stay tuned for more news soon.

For a WordPress Meetup near you and other blogging events, check out the WordPress Meetup Group List.

For more news on WordPress, see:

Extra Tip of the Week

Don’t Use Plug-in for Your Plugins: The key to being found in search engines is being found under the right word. WordPress Plugins use the word plugin not “plug-in”. If your WordPress Plugin is listed as WordPress Plug-in, the odds are that it is not being found by searchers.

While you can call your WordPress Plugin anything you want, to improve the odds of your hard work getting the recognition it deserves, name it XYZ WordPress Plugin rather than XYZ Plugin for WordPress. People tend to search for “XYZ WordPress Plugin” and the more words separating “WordPress” and “Plugin” could place your Plugin lower in the search results pages.

Each Wednesday on is WordPress Wednesday, featuring the news around the WordPress Community.

Lorelle VanFossen blogs about blogging and WordPress on .

The author of Lorelle on WordPress and the fast-selling book, Blogging Tips: What Bloggers Won't Tell You About Blogging, as well as several other blogs, Lorelle VanFossen has been blogging for over 15 years, covering blogging, WordPress, travel, nature and travel photography, web design, web theory and development extensively as web technologies developed.

View Comments (6)

  • The big new stat plugin is disappointing. It requires that you go to wordpress.com to get your results. What if you had to leave your admin panel to delete comment spam using Askimet? Would it be as popular?

    Lorelle, these Wednesday posts are starting to surpass your own blog. Good for Blog Herald, perhaps not so good for your fans.

  • Lorelle… I love reading these every week… I get great insight on WordPress and new ideas for blogging.

    I would like to ask if you could add any news you find on WPMU… I’m using WPMU in a few places now, and could use pointers to make them better!

    Thank you for all you do!!

  • Skarld: I haven’t tried the Plugin yet, but that is one of the features that I thought was rather odd. It does save on bandwidth though. This is still early days so let’s wait and see what more they come up with on this before passing final judgment.

    And I’m glad you enjoy these WordPress Wednesday News. Actually, I don’t report on my blog most of the WordPress-related news topics I include here. Only major issues. Lorelle on WordPress is for the technical how-to information on WordPress and blogging, not the little bits and pieces of the news, important as it may be. Only the BIG WordPress news. I track the WordPress news in general, so this allows me to share what I find that I don’t share on my blog. So I’m thrilled you like it. It is a LOT of work.

    Jim: I do cover WordPressMU “news” when I find it. There isn’t much out there but I keep hunting. And thanks for enjoying these.

  • I have heard of a company that will design your wordpress blog for you with all the bells and whistles. I’ll have to get back to you with the info though.

Scroll To Top