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.

*** UPDATE ***
Recently Popular Getting Some Much Deserved Attention

Download the Recently Popular plugin

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 four tags: %post_url% – the post’s permalink %post_title% – the post’s title %hits% – the number of qualifying views %display_name% – the post’s author 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 get_recently_popular($interval_length, $interval_type, $limit, $user_type, $post_type, $output_format, $categories); ?> </ul>

Where:

• $interval_length is the number of $interval_type to consider.
• $interval_type is the type of interval. This needs to be the string HOUR, DAY, WEEK, or MONTH
• $limit is the maximum number of posts to display.
• $user_type is the types of users you want to count views from. 0 = All, 1 = Anonymous only, 2 = Registered only.
• $post_type is the types of posts you want to count views from. 0 = All, 1 = Pages only, 2 = Posts only.
• $output_format is a formatting string for how to display each result in the list.
• $categories is a string formatted as: ” ‘Category 1′, ‘Category 2′ “, including the single quotes, with every category you wish to include listed. If this value is not supplied or is an empty string then all categories are considered.

For example, this will show the ten most viewed pages and posts in the past one month by users who weren’t logged in:

<ul> <?php get_recently_popular(1, 'MONTH', 10, 1, 0); ?> </ul>

While this will show the five most viewed posts in the past two weeks by all users:

<ul> <?php get_recently_popular(2, 'WEEK', 5, 0, 2); ?> </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.

Seems like such a simple, simple request. Well, either those projects don’t exist or they do a horrible job marketing themselves because I was unable to find one. Everything I found wanted me to delve into the depths of their own custom and oh-so-cool configuration system, typically consisting of multiple config files linking together in some esoteric way.

Well no more. I have a very simple Python script that does just that and no more. It pulls it’s work items from a MySQL database, then writes the results back into that database, generating graphs as it runs. In the spirit of DRY (don’t repeat yourself) this isn’t a daemon. This is a simple one-shot script so that you can run it manually as you see fit or just schedule it in cron. I intend to make the script use SQLite or XML by default to further reduce the amount of configuration and setup needed.

I’ve submitted the project for approval at SourceForge, but I’ve gone ahead and registered the domain http://pynger.org/ either way.

I set it up using Simple Machines Forum (SMF) software version 1.1.4. I must say that I’m very impressed with the way they’ve gone about putting the package together and I anxiously await their upcoming 2.0 release. I may post more about this excellent package later.

I’m currently writing an open source modification that will allow the site users to basically create their own forum out of the site’s existing forums. It should be exciting. We’re calling it “My Forum” for now. I’ve written this feature set into a copy of phpBB a couple of years ago, and I must say that doing it in SMF is proving to be much easier.

After we complete My Forum I’ll be working on a comprehensive user ignore modification. I have some experience through writing CPIggy (http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/12975) about what an ignore script should do and the challenges you face when writing one.