I’ve tidied up a few of the small bugs mentioned on the support forum at http://wordpress.org/support/plugin/ultimate-google-analytics, so the code should contain a few less niggling little problems.
I’ve also moved development over to github, in case anyone else wants to help out with the maintenance burden. The code can be downloaded at https://github.com/robotii/ultimate-google-analytics.
Please feel free to clone the repository and send pull requests if you do anything interesting.
I really like the Ultimate Google Analytics plugin for WordPress. It does exactly as I need it to do in terms of ensuring that the Analytics code is embedded in each page. Unfortunately it hasn’t been updated since 2008, and the code is a little out of date.
I have taken the liberty of updating some of the code, and have posted it here for you to share. This adds in the most recent GA javascript, allowing it to load asynchronously and hence speed the page load time. I am keen to make further changes, but I have contacted the author of the original code to see if he is willing to pass the maintenance burden onto myself.
The code is compatible with any version of WordPress from 1.5 to 3.2.1 and probably beyond. That said, please leave a comment if you do have any problems with it.
Download: ultimate_ga_1.6.1.zip
iPod Touch
I have recently downloaded the WordPress client for the iTouch and iPhone and started playing about with it.
First impressions are that it is very straightforward to set up your blog for use with it. I was running a slightly out of date version of wordpress, which the application warned me about. A quick upgrade to the latest version and we were good to go.
Writing on the iTouch is not the most pleasant experience, but the WordPress client is easy to use in spite of this, providing a means to compose offline and update when safely back within range of a wifi network. Interestingly it has everything working that you can do through the web version, with the exception of being able to add pictures to a post. I’m going to try it for a bit longer before passing any judgement, but it seems a very promising app, with the added bonus of being zero cost.
You may have noticed that there is now a post rate feature installed on the site. Go ahead, use it. I have also made some changes to the backend, so hopefully loading times should now be acceptable. The main core has been upgraded to WordPress 2.1 so should be a bit nicer in terms of load on the server.
I have also tweaked the theme, and would be interested to know what people think of it. Personally I think its not quite there yet, but increasing the size of the text has made it a bit more readable.
I have upgraded the site to WordPress 2.0 after reading the comments about it and deciding to risk trying it out. Along the way I discovered a number of wordpress plugins which I am trying out. Shortstat which collects stats about your blog and shows a nice one page summary of the users visiting your site. It seems a lot faster than the BAStats that I was previously using, which corrupted my database, leaving me no option but to turn it off.
The other plugin I’m using is WordPress Database Backup which allows you to take a backup of your site and email it to yourself. It would be nice if it had the feature to automatically do this every day, or on a regular schedule, but I don’t add too much content here so its not a big problem to do it on an ad hoc basis.
It seems like absolutely ages since I last posted here, and it may well be. I seem to have been busy working and trying to get Christmas sorted. I’ve also been playing about with xinha, after seeing the excellent xinha4wp plugin for wordpress. I am about to release some code which will be open source, based off the Wakka Wiki source code, and released to the general public. But first I need to tidy up the code.
I expect that this will be met with a deafening wall of silence, as pretty much no one is reading this, but at least it gives me something to do.
See the original announcement of the new WordPress version. I upgraded this site a couple of hours ago, and it looks like the upgrade was mostly successful. Also, you may notice I have added a few extra plugins to the WordPress installation, which should make the site slower, but better. I’ve had a few minor hiccups with this 1.5.1 upgrade where a few plugins refused to work. The main disappointment is that BAStats plugin no longer works, which means that I am no longer able to track hits to the site in the level of detail I have become accustomed to.
I have yet to turn on the Static page generation, as this has not become an issue, but I am looking at writing my own plugin, which will allow the static generation to be turned on and off on a category or post basis, allowing finer grained control of the static files.