This series also brings full support for network based (MU) installations. It will properly create and clean up after itself if you network (de)active or do so on individual blogs. We’ve also tested on WordPress 3.2 and found no compatibility problems.

There was a bug fix release, 0.7.1, that came out the day after 0.7. That release was done to implement a workaround that was affecting people running eAccelerator on Centos, which has a known bug parsing PHP classes in included files.

• Now fully OOP.
• Network (MU) compatibility.
• WP 3.2 updates and testing.
• %thumbnail_url% tag reintroduced.
• Default thumbnail URL parameter added.
• Counts for posts in multiple categories is fixed.
• %category% tag is fixed.

So, that’s quite a lot of work to be pushed into one release. As such I’m going to need some testers. I know there are a number of you who have been waiting for a number of these fixes, so get the copy from trunk. Two notes before you do so:

1. There were no changes to the database structure, so you won’t need to wipe out your existing data. HOWEVER, if you disable this plugin it does remove its tables. If you’re in a Network (MU) install you will have to disable and re-enable the plugin so that it will build the correct tables.
2. The plugin and widget files were renamed, so be sure to delete the old ones when you copy the new files up.

As always I’m eating my own dog food, so trunk is live on this site and working. If you find bugs please email me or comment on this post. Thanks.

Also added is a settings page which allows you to delete older counts.

As a heads up: I upgraded several times without issues in my testing environment, but when I upgraded this site I received a bad copy of one of the files.  Deleting and reinstalling the plugin through the WordPress site fixed the issue for me, so I’m hoping it was just a bad file transfer.  If anyone else has issues please let me know.

*Update* So one of the mirrors wound up with a bad file.  0.6.1 was tagged to get it to refresh.  This seems to have worked.

*Update* 0.6.2 was released to fix an oversight where the select query wasn’t working for people with non-standard table prefixes.

Coming in the 0.6 release will be a settings page that will allow you to delete counts older than a time that you specify.  I’m also hoping to come up with a CPU-friendly way to specify an automated daily clean-up of all counts older than a given period.

Comments from the blog post have made it abundantly clear that activating the plugin and the widget separately was a poor idea.  They will be combined in this release.

The query that adds the counts will be re-examined, specifically the indexes that exist on our table and how they interact with the stock tables and their indexing during the query that sums up counts.

The plugin will be tested in WordPress 2.9.2, and listed as such in the directory.

This will also be a major clean-up release.  After eight months of not working on the project it is clear that there’s a dearth of comments in the source.  That will be corrected.

So in closing, thanks to everyone for your patience.

I spent a bit more time on it tonight and have version 0.5 committed into the trunk.  In the limited testing I’ve been able to do tonight it appears to solve all the current issues the plugin has, including multiplying hits by the number of categories a post is in.  If some of you would be so kind as to download, install, and test trunk I would appreciate it.

You can download trunk from here.

I’ve used a few different plugins to manage the most popular post display on my sidebar. None of them behaved quite the way I wanted. The two major groups and their issues for me were:

• Post counts last forever: This is a big deal if an article gets Dugg or Slashdotted. That post may live at the top of your most popular list long past its useful lifespan.
• Formula-based: These use some formula of views, comments, and who-knows-what-else to try and derive what is most popular. These also count things into perpetuity, but generally they discount dated items as they age. The fact that views aren’t dated is still a problem.

I knew what I wanted. I wanted a popularity meter that I could tell “Show the posts that have been most viewed over the last 7 days.” Or 3 weeks. Or 12 hours. Or whatever. However I couldn’t find it. So I wrote a plugin (with widget!) to do just that. It records hits to any post or page on your site by any user who isn’t logged in, then allows you to display the most active ones for your defined time period on your sidebar.

Recently Popular Widget 0.6 (simple)

Recently Popular Widget 0.6 (formatting options)

Recently Popular Widget 0.6 (category options)

The widget can be added to your sidebar more than once, so if you want to show the most popular over the last five days and the most popular over the last month you can.

Output formatting

The widget supports formatting strings for items in the results. These formatting strings accept HTML, so you can be as creative as you want. The template supports the following tags:

• %post_title% – the post’s title
• %post_excerpt% – the post’s excerpt
• %post_url% – the post’s permalink
• %hits% – the number of qualifying views
• %display_name% – the post’s author
• %user_url% – the post author’s URL
• %publish_date% – the post’s publish date
• %category% – the categories the post is in
• %thumbnail_url% – the URL for the post’s thumbnail

To simply show the post titles as links to the post you would use this tag (note: this is the default output format):

<a href="%post_url">%post_title%</a>

The widget defines this and two other typical tags that you to simply click on and use without having to figure out the templating.

Using in Themes Without Widget Support

To install this plugin in a theme that doesn’t support widgets you add something similar to this to your template:

<ul><?php
  $rp = new RecentlyPopular();
  $rp->get_counts();
?></ul>

The get_counts() function takes a single parameter that is an array of the options. The options and their defaults are (default options in bold where applicable):

For example, this will show the five most viewed posts (without pages) in the past three weeks by users who weren’t logged in:

<ul><?php
  $rp = new RecentlyPopular();
  $rp->get_counts(array(
    'limit' => 5,
    'post_type' => RecentlyPopularPostType::POSTS,
    'user_type' => RecentlyPopularUserType::ANONYMOUS,
    'interval_length' => 3,
    'interval_type' => 'WEEK',
  ));
?></ul>

The script itself is very simple.  For users who have multiple email accounts set up in their GMail account, when you go to send a message it pops up a warning telling you which address you’re sending from and gives you the option of canceling or continuing.  You can visit the script’s homepage at UserScripts.org to install it or to see any potential future enhancements.

As these types of projects generally do, this one wound up being a really good learning experience for me, as chronicled in this earlier post.  So, thanks “wmblewett”.  I hope you enjoy the script as much as I enjoyed the experience writing it.

Now, back to work on those extended features that have been requested.

update: I now have a native Firefox extension that you can download which does the same thing.  Right click and choose “Save Link”, then save it to your computer.  Then drag the file into a Firefox window and allow it to install.  Get it here. You can still use the GreaseMonkey script below if you prefer.

Well, problem solved.  My old friend GreaseMonkey and I got together for a minute and here’s what we came up with:

// ==UserScript==
// @name           Nealz Nuze Formatter
// @namespace      eric.biven
// @description    Restores Nealz Nuze to it's previous glory (with improvements).
// @include        http://boortz.com/*
// @include        http://www.boortz.com/*
// ==/UserScript==
 
var listenLive = document.getElementById('streamLink');
listenLive.style.cssFloat = 'right';
listenLive.style.width = '200px';
 
var header = document.getElementById('logoAdContainer');
header.removeChild(header.childNodes[1]);
header.appendChild(listenLive);
 
var ads = document.getElementById('rightColumnCell');
ads.parentNode.removeChild(ads);
 
var head = document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0];
if (head) {
    style = document.createElement('style');
    style.type = 'text/css';
    style.appendChild(document.createTextNode('.hrDivider, .blogFooter, .blogEntryByline { display: none; }'));
    style.appendChild(document.createTextNode('.blogEntry { padding-bottom:20px; }'));
    style.appendChild(document.createTextNode('.storyhed { padding-bottom:10px; display:block; }'));
    style.appendChild(document.createTextNode('.blogEntryBody > table { margin:10px 0px 10px 20px; }'));
    style.appendChild(document.createTextNode('#pageWrapper, #centerColumn { width:auto; }'));
    style.appendChild(document.createTextNode('.pageContainer { margin:0px 10px 0px 10px; }'));
 
    head.appendChild(style);
}

This script is available for download from UserScripts.org at http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/36900.  It will return the page to a look that is more familiar to readers.  I’ve taken the liberty of adding a little more white space around some items as well.

New Layout

If you aren’t familiar with GreaseMonkey, here’s a quick rundown.  GreaseMonkey is an addon for the Firefox web browser that lets you run scripts against pages and change how they look and/or behave.  In this case I’m removing ads, then changing the style of some elements.  You can install GreaseMonkey from here:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/748

Once you’ve installed GreaseMonkey and restarted Firefox, make sure the little monkey icon down at the bottom of your Firefox window is brown.  If he’s grey, click on him (this enables GreaseMonkey).  Then click this link and allow the script to install:

http://userscripts.org/scripts/source/36900.user.js

Once the script is installed you’ll be able to view Nealz Nuze in all of its former glory.  Enjoy.

Read more about this at:

http://boortz.com/nealz_nuze/2008/11/dont-blame-me-nor-the-web-wenc.html

update: Now corrects their page width so that the text is always the width of your browser.

update: It should now work on Neal’s entire site and it moves the listen live link into the header of the page.