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Two New Wordpress Plugins

Tue 21 Feb 2006 9:47pm

So, I just released two new Wordpress plugins. Both were originally designed as extensions for alwaysBETA and cleaned up for public release. You can read my initial post about them on alwaysBETA. They are:

  • SparkStats - This plugin generates small sparkline graphs representing the posting and commenting activity on your Wordpress blog over a certain number of days. Nice, pretty statistics to spice up your blog and provide some sense of what’s been going on. I’m working on generalizing it to also display by week or month for blogs with less activity.

  • Extended Tags - This is a very simple tagging plugin. It is intended to be used alongside a more fully-featured tagging plugin to provide more specific metadata for your posts that you don’t necessarily want polluting your taglist. (i.e. tags like “web” belong in your cloud while “foobar 2000 bugs” might go in the extended tags.) These tags can then be hidden with styles so that they are just picked up by aggregators like Technorati.

That’s about all. I’m gradually building up tools and ideas to incorporate into an eventual publically-released Wordpress theme. It’ll be cool, I promise.

Comments (9 So Far)

1
James Byers says:
Wed 22 Feb 2006 - 6:25pm

SparkStats looks sweet! Naturally, I’ve added it to my blog. :)

Let me know if you run into any trouble with the Sparkline PHP library, I’m happy to help out.

Best,
James

2
jbyers - blog » Wordpress Sparklines says:
Wed 22 Feb 2006 - 6:37pm

[…] Yesterday, I stumbled on Sean McBride’s excellent SparkStats plugin for WordPress 2.0. A minute later, and zap - posting and comment stats are now in my sidebar. Thanks Sean! […]

3
Eli says:
Mon 27 Feb 2006 - 11:25am

Great work! Love your site and alwaysbeta!! Very inspirational - keep it up!

4
ryan says:
Tue 28 Feb 2006 - 3:48pm

I have an implementation question, and if you’re not up for responding (I’m not sure what it would take to answer), then you can stop reading now, although that’s humanly impossible.

Anyway, I noticed on alwaysBETA.com that you guys (or you? or wp?) implemented a “comment is under review” type of capability. Recently, I had a runin with some wacky commenting on my site (which no longer exists), and there were about 30 random nasty and seemingly automated comments on my site. I would like to implement a way to first check the person’s comment before allowing it to be published to the world, then once I know that person is ok, let them post without reviewing the comments. I’m not sure if you are familiar with ruby on rails or not, but maybe you could guide me towards what would need to be done for this to work? Is this something that came with wordpress for alwaysBETA, or is it something you’ve implemented? Thanks for any help…

5
Sean says:
Wed 1 Mar 2006 - 12:19am

Hey ryan,

Well, yes, the ability to moderate comments is built into Wordpress, and there are several plugins that automatically filter out spam using different means. Unfortunately, comment spam is becoming more and more common. You should use a blogging platform that has builtin support for countering it. If you are using Typo, I’m not sure what comment spam plugins are available… For Wordpress, search for Akismet (which comes with WP2) or Spam Karma.

6
jammo says:
Tue 7 Mar 2006 - 10:32pm

added this to my blawg tonight.
really neat. i likey! :)

just had to change some mild colors, thats all.
excellent job Sean!

7

[…] *UPDATE*installed and running.lookit the top right corner from the homepage. SparkStats Wordpress PluginSparkStats is a plugin for the Wordpress blogging platform. SparkStats uses the Sparkline PHP Graphing Library to generate word-like graphs that represent the posting and commenting activity on your blog over a period of days. Sparklines are small, lightweight bits of graphical information, perfect for adding a little statistical information and visual style to your blog at the same time.What Do They Look Like? […]

8
Anshul says:
Tue 30 May 2006 - 9:51pm

Great plugins there! Why dont you release a theme for wordpress? I am sure ti will be a great hit!

9
FunnyNumbers.net - links for 2006-06-29 says:
Thu 29 Jun 2006 - 2:36am

[…] SeanMcb.com ยป Two New Wordpress Plugins “SparkStats - This plugin generates small sparkline graphs representing the posting and commenting activity on your Wordpress blog over a certain number of days.” (tags: sparklines wordpress) No Comments […]

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Sean McBride
Engineer / Web Developer
Boston, MA - Billings, MT

"There's one in every class."

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