There’s just something satisfying about being in complete control of your data… even the analytics. Switching over from Woopra was tough – it’s an incredibly well run service with regular updates, a gorgeous UI, and great community of developers. However, as with all free analytics services, there are limitations. While analytics don’t matter to me as much as businesses, I do like to track the site’s growth over time – and by “time”, I need the service to collect more than 3 months of data. Read more  

If you look at the sidebar on RK.md, you can rearrange the fields (Posts, Comments, etc.) in whatever order you want. Furthermore, you can open/close the boxes as you see fit. The best thing about these features is that the user options are stored in a cookie, so the website remembers how you like the sidebar arranged as you browse from page to page (and the next time you visit). Read more  

WordPress 2.8 was released a few days ago, and being the nerd I am, I was one of the first 100 downloaders (at the time of this writing, there have been over 450,000 downloads). Unfortunately, I’m not very pleased with this release. Read more  

Woopra Analytics allows administrators to exclude statistics based on a number of criteria (IP address, user names, etc.) However, for websites with only one administrator, a better approach would be to prevent loading the Woopra javascript (JS) in the first place whenever the admin accesses the site. Read more  

After having bounced around between Google Analytics, WordPress.com Stats, and Woopra Analytics, I’m choosing to side with Woopra’s service for a few reasons:

• All the statistics one could ever want
• Real-time site views
• Ability to chat with site viewers
• OS X, Linux, and Windows desktop clients
• Online interface (real time) for web-based access
• Still in the beginning stages of development, so a lot more is to come.

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When modifying a WordPress theme’s comments section, developers may want to include a particular comment’s number in the flow of the other comments of a given post/page. For example, if you look at the meta section of any comment on this site, you’ll see that I’ve incorporated such a feature. Do I have a reason? No. I just had some free time, and wanted to waste a PHP call. Read more  

I browse through the blogosphere regularly, and it’s interesting to note how many webmasters have a section dedicated to the social networking. Whether it’s helping you find them on Facebook or Last.fm, or allowing you to share a particular page/post on Digg or Slashdot, the idea of social networking is a must for bloggers who want to effectively link themselves with the rest of the world.  Read more  

To further modify my rendition of StudioPress’ Streamline theme, I implemented a tabbed sidebar. By doing so, I was able to display the same amount of information (recent posts, most commented posts, recent comments, etc.) without occupying as much screen real estate. Furthermore, tabbed menus prevent a visitor from being overwhelmed by information. They can simply click and view whatever they want. Read more  

This plugin does not work with WordPress 2.8+ and has therefore been disabled on the site.
If you’ve been looking for a new way to give your WordPress.org powered site a more “Web 2.0″ look, you’ve undoubtedly discovered the elegance of AJAX. Before WordPress 2.7, there was a “comment loop” which allowed people to really fidget around with how the comments were presented through template files. Now, there’s a simple PHP call which does everything for you, but at least for me, it took a while before I found a nice plugin to enable AJAX commenting on WP 2.7.

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I came across a situation where I had to go through my WordPress database to update the URL information for one of my frequent commenters in light of his new domain name. Rather than modifying each of his comments one by one, I sought a single database query which would reflect the update. Read more