An injection of whimsy

As you know it’s been on the cards for a little while to redesign Wibsite.com (yes, again) to inject some of the old-fashioned whimsy back in. I must admit I went too far in down the “corporate blue” road with the current design.

To that end Dave and I have come up with a new design which hopefully I’ll soon get into production:

What do you think?

By the way, you may see some yellow boxes appear on some screens in your admin section with a “Donate” button on. Just click “Hide this”.

Keep Wibsite.com afloat

A few people have been asking how they can send chocolate to the Wibsite team in recognition of the small amount of easy work we do maintaining the Wibsite. Well, that’s not really practical (although we do love chocolate). Instead please consider donating to help pay for cubes of cheese for the Wibsite monkeys.

There’s a donate button here (at the bottom of the page). It’s in GBP (pounds sterling) as I couldn’t work out how to allow you to set your own currency. Sorry about that. You should get a nice email thanking you for your donation.

Any questions, please let me know.

Announcing VoucherPress

Here’s a strange one. I had an idea a little while ago to write a plugin for Wordpress (that’s the blogging system we all use right here on Wibsite.com) that would create vouchers. Not sure where that idea came from, it seemed a good idea at the time.

Well, you know me and ideas. So I’ve written it. There’s no documentation at the moment, so you’ll have to figure out how to use it yourself (although I’m around if you get stuck). The basic idea is to provide things like this: You have WON!

Hopefully that will give you a PDF to print off. It should take up about one third of a piece of A4 or letter-sized paper (you may have to change the default orientation before you print, though).

I’ll let you guys play with this for a few days and see if there are any problems, then I’ll release this to the world through my usual plugin page.

New themes for Christmas

As it’s getting towards party season and everyone likes a new frock, I’ve added a few extra themes for you to try on:

- BlackPower
- IMPREZZ
- Compositio
- Glassical
- Irresistible
- WordPress Brown (not as boring as it sounds)

I’ve not had chance to test any of these, so if you try one and it breaks let me know and I’ll sort it out.

Easy invites

Just a quickie. I’ve put a link to a simple form to invite people to join the Wibsite on the homepage of the site. Just click the “Invite someone to join our Wibfamily” link and fill in the form. Easy peasy.

This is really just to test an update to one of my Wordpress plugins (you don’t mind being guinea pigs, do you?)

Wibstats – statistics for Wordpress MU

Now that you chaps have been kind enough to help me sort out the Wibstats statistics plugin, the time has come to share the love. So I’ve released the plugin for anyone to use on the wpmudev.org website. See the details here:

Blog statistics for Wordpress Multi-User

I really am most grateful to you all for your patience and help while I built this thing. Of course, any future developments (new reports and graphs, anyone?) will be released to you first. And if anyone still has problems with the system, please let me know and I’ll try to sort it out.

Logging in problems

It appears there are major problems at the moment, as mentioned by quite a few people here: http://wibsite.com/board/topic/help. Basically the data that stored which user had what level of access to which blogs has disappeared. I’ve manually reset about 10% of you, but the rest will have to wait for a couple of days.

I’m really sorry about this, I don’t know how it happened but it may be omething to do with the system update I made on Friday night (Wordpress MU 2.7.1, for those who are interested).

Anyway, I’m on the case and will get everyone back up and running as soon as I can.

Statistics: very much here

Well, I pulled a late one last night and got some reports done. You can now see on the front page (just go into your Dashboard and click ‘Blog statistics’):

• Unique visitors and number of pages viewed ever, in the last 28 days, in the last 7 days, in the last 24 hours
• Number of visitors and pages viewed each day for the last 14 days (with a little barchart!)
• Last 10 search words which brought people to your Wiblog
• 10 most popular search words
• Last 10 visitor locations (country and city)
• 10 most popular visitor locations (country)
• 10 most popular pages viewed
• 10 most popular platforms (that’s the visitors operating system, like Windows, or something much better like Linux)
• 10 most popular browser
• 10 most popular screen sizes

And then you can click some lovely links to view:

• The last 100 search words used and which page the searcher arrived at on your Wiblog
• The top 100 most popular search words which brought people to your Wiblog
• The last 100 visitor locations (country and city)
• The top 100 most popular visitor locations (country)
• And the top 100 most popular pages

I know some people will ask so I’ll answer your question now: sorry, no flags (yet).

Anyway, have fun. My grateful thanks go to the clever chaps at hostip.info for their geolocation API. I’ll let them know we’re the people hitting their servers several times per second, and hopefully they’ll allow us to keep getting that lovely geolocation information.

Statistics: nearly here

It’s been quite a while since I said I would write a new statistics package for all Wiblogs, but I’ve finally started. In fact the plugin is installed and is currently gathering information about visitors.

You can’t se any reports yet as basically I haven’t written that part. However that’s the (relatively) easy bit. And as we save all manner of information – browser, operating system, screen size, search words etc – there’s a million and one ways to slice the information, so I should be able to do some interesting reports for you.

One new little bit of information being saved is the city of the visitor, as well as their country. However the city is pretty flaky, so don’t expect it to be 100% correct. Still, it’s interesting.

Right, must dash. This code won’t write itself.

Of websites and things

Time, as it is wont to do, is moving on. And although I have precisely no time, I’m going to tell you about a few things I’d like to do with the Wibsite. Maybe by posting this here I’ll find some time to actually do some of this. Here’s my might-do list:

1. Fix the login thing so you don’t have to log in again to use the boards.
2. Create some form of advertising system so that those Wibloggers who wish to support the running of the Wibsite can put some unobtrusive adverts on their blogs. No pressure at all.
3. Potentially redesiging the site. I get the feeling, though I may be wrong, that the way the main Wibsite looks doesn’t “feel” right. It was a radical departure from the old look, but maybe too radical. Some feedback on that would be appreciated.
4. Think of a point number four.

So, is there anything else you’d like to see? Consider this a call for agenda items for the Wibsite Parishoners Annual General Meeting.