Is there an alternative to Feedburner?

Thursday, October 30th, 2008

We all use Feedburner to track our RSS subscribers. It’s not just to feed that egotistical need to know how many people are hanging onto our every word, but the number of RSS feed subscribers you have is an important metric for indicating the success (or failure) of your blog. It seems that the number of subscribers has a connection with the number of visitors to a site since I’ve found that the number of people visiting a site seems to rise in relation to the number of feed subscribers, but this metric also indicates the stickiness of your content.

But recently Feedburner has not been behaving. We have one client whose feed consistently showed a page that said something like “Kraaak bork, your Feedburner feed is not working,” a stressful site to say the least for a guy who wants to make sure his feed subscribers are getting his content. Many people have been complaining about problems with Feedburner in the last while: ReadWriteWeb reported that Feedburner was slow on pinging feeds, and over here at WordPress Garage I had the pleasure of watching our readers plunge from 1030 to 380. The next day the number went back up, and I can’t imagine it’s because 700 of you unsubscribed and then regretted your decision and resubscribed.

(And may I just take this opportunity to thank all our subscribers for sticking with us. We love you. You rock.)

Anyways, this situation is yet another example of the scariness of a) The Google monopoly (Google bought Feedburner) and b) The problem with allowing services to “own” your content. This is similar to the problem with hosting your blog on WordPress.com, which I’ve discussed here in the past. In the case of Feedburner, your are at their mercy if they have trouble with the service, or if for some reason they decide to cancel your account, in which case  you lose all your preciously collected subscribers.

So…the question is: is there an alternative to Feedburner? After doing a bit of searching, I found the following alternative ways for measuring feed subscribers:

1. Check how many people are subscribed to your blog on feed reader services that offer these types of stats, like Bloglines and Google Reader. See this post for instructions on how to see the number of subscribers on each service. This solutions would allow you to see general trends, like if the number of subscribers is going up or down, and you could even calculate percentage growth or decline. However, you would not get a good indication of the total number of subscribers on all feed readers.
2. (The following methods were all described on this post on the Free Marketing Zone.) Access logs: Use server logs to track how many times your feed page was accessed. This apparently does not give accurate results.
3. Images: Put a 1px by 1px image in your feed, which will be accessed every time your feed is opened in a reader. However, this only tells you how many people are reading your RSS, not how many are subscribed.
4. RSS Buttons: track the number of clicks of your image button that leads to an RSS feed. This is also not accurate since some people may just click and then not subscribe, and many people subscribe to an RSS feed without clicking on a button on your site; they use the RSS access in their browsers address bar, or simply enter your site’s URL in their feed reader, and the reader detects the URL automatically.
5. Tracking URL: Create a unique URL for every click to access the feed, so that whenever a person clicks the button, a unique URL is assigned, like the following: http://domain.com/feed.xml?uniqueurl_countvisitors. But I don’t know about that option – it sounds a bit much to create so many new URLs for a site.

As you can see, these options are ok, but not great. So if anyone knows of another service that provides feed subscription stat services, please let us know. And if there isn’t another option, please can someone create one? It would do all of us a great service.

Posted in News & Views | Tags: FeedBurner, feeds | 29 Comments »

Revolution themes enters next evolution

Thursday, October 30th, 2008

You’ve probably heard the news, but I’m going to join the echo chamber anyways: Brian Gardner has taken his “Revolution” into a new Open Source evolution over at Revolution Two. Now he has a bunch of partners, and the themes are released under Open GPL license, which pretty much means you can use them any way you like and for any (legal) purposes. The business model is that people can buy membership packages which gives them access to advice and guidance related to the themes, as well as custom design services and hosting .

The premium Revolution themes will be available until tomorrow, and at midnight they will turn into a pumpkin. But no worries – the new themes look fantastic, and really add to the WordPress community.

Posted in Themes | Tags: free themes, magazine themes, premium themes, Wordpress themes | No Comments »

Best 4 Wordpress Calendar plugins

Wednesday, October 29th, 2008

Here’s a review of 4 of the most comprehensive calendar plugins that Wordpress has to offer. I tried out each one and tracked the features, pros, and cons.  Which calendar are you using? Send a link so we can see some more examples.  For a full list Wordpress calendar plugins, click here.

Still in search of a perfect calendar…

I still have hopes and dreams that the perfect calendar is out there somewhere, but I can’t seem to find The One. I’m looking for a Wordpress compatible calendar that can do the following:

• recurring events – monthly, weekly, bi-weekly
• month view
• list view with option to see 15 results for upcoming events and then to click “Next” to see next results
• import a csv file of ongoing events
• Advanced search functionality to do the following. For example, search for Events in New York City on December 1. Or to search by venue, city, topic, and other categories.
• RSS events feed
• user level management – a way for different organizations to submit and manage their own events
• Email notifications when someone has added or edited an event

Event Calendar 3 by Alex Tingle

Display upcoming events in a dynamic calendar, on a listings page, or as a list in the sidebar.

Features

• iCal feed subscription
• sidebar widget – monthly & list view
• easy admin to add events from Write>Post
• links to a post for more details

Cons

• no recurring events
• no RSS event feed
• no large view calendar
• no categories
• no fields within events such as location, contact person
• no user level management

Calendar by Kieran O’Shea

A simple calendar plugin for WordPress that allows you to manage your events and display them in list or month format.

Features

• Monthly view of events
• Mouse-over details for each event
• Events can have a timestamp (optional)
• Events can display their author (optional)
• Events can span more than one day
• Multiple events per day possible
• Events can repeat on a weekly, monthly or yearly basis
• Repeats can occur indefinitely or a limited number of times
• Easy to use events manager in admin dashboard
• Sidebar function/Widget to show todays events
• Sidebar function/Widget to show upcoming events
• Comprehensive options panel for admin
• Modifiable CSS using the options panel
• Optional drop down boxes to quickly change month and year
• User groups other than admin can be permitted to manage events
• Events can be placed into categories
• Categories system can be switched on or off
• Pop up javascript calendars help the choosing of dates
• Events can be links pointing to a location of your choice

Cons

• no events feed
• no fields within events such as location, contact person
• no search feature
• no bi-weekly recurring events
• no way to import a csv of recurring events

Gigs Calendar by Dan Coulter

This plugin is designed for bands touring but can be used for any events.

Features

• list view
• amazing options in the admin panel – arrange table view of events, link to Google maps, etc.
• events feed
• fields for city, venue, start time, contact details
• once you select a venue, the contact details appear automatically! Big time saver.
• each event links to the details
• user level management

Cons

• no month calendar view
• no recurring events
• no way to search/sort by month, venue, city, date

Gigpress by Derek Hogue

Another plugin designed for bands touring but can be used for any events.

Features

• list view
• user level management
• events feed
• fields for venue, venue website, address, country, etc.
• connects to posts with a link that says “related post” [I think it should say "More details"]

Cons

• no month calendar view
• no recurring events
• doesn’t connect to a post – all the info needs to be written in the table which isn’t good if you have a lot of text
  
• no way to search/sort by month, venue, city, date

Easy PHP Calendar Plugin

EasyPHPCalendar is a script you can buy for $20. To integrate it into the Wordpress admin, you can use the Wordpress plugin. This is by far the most comprehensive calendar you can use in conjunction with Wordpress. It has tons of features, template options, and display options. Just beware of the clunky setup which may take a few hours to do properly. Also, there are certain features which can’t  be modified because they’re encrypted by the Calendar developers. Luckily, the support forum on the site is pretty active.

Features

• mySQL database support
• Flat-file database support – No mySQL server required!
• Single events, recurring events and floating events plus multiple categories
• Complete and easy event and setup administration
• Mouse-over and pop-up event details
• Customizable categories and multiple event administrators
• Rich event descriptions including font sizes/colors and images
• different templates for list view and month view
• active support forum and RSS feed for latest entries in forum
• See more details

Cons

• complex setup
• weak search and filtering
• no easy way to import a CSV of recurring events
• no events feed
• some encrypted code which may leave you helpless if you want to modify certain functionality

[Update ]

WP-Events by Arnan de Gans

The plugin features a straightforward user interface in the Wordpress dashboard to add/edit and delete events and set some options. Events allows you to list Events on a seperate page or in the sidebar, or both. Here you can list Old (archived) events future events and if you want, events happening today. When you create or edit an event you can set it to be archived. So that it remains listed. Optionally non-archived events are automatically deleted one day (24 hours) after they expire. Many more options are available and Events is completely customizable to your theme in an easy and flexible manner.

Features:

• Widget for themes that support it
• non-widget option: Code to put into templates
• Separate page for events
• Completely customizable layout
• Multi language
• Link events to pages/posts
• Set a start and end time (duration) for events
• Set locations for events
• Show events in your sidebar
• Archive events
• Edit existing events
• Auto remove old, non-archived events
• Unlimited dateformats to show events dates
• Options page
• Set a date and time to the minute
• Set a message to show before and another one to show after the event occurs
• User level restriction
• Management page
• Set amount of events to show in the sidebar

Cons:

Since the events in this plugin are separate from posts,  the integration with linking and feeds is not so great. Other than that, I really like all the options and customization available. Definitely worth trying out.

• No events feed – I wanted to offer my readers a way to get the events feed but because the events are entries rather than posts, I couldn’t figure out an easy way to do it.
• Page/post relationship links – You can add a post and then create a link from the event to the post, but this seems like double the work and not so intuitive.. I guess I could link events to the main events page for more info, but then there is no direct event link to send your friends or refer back to it.
• Date format – the date shows up as March 04, 2009 at 04:00pm and I couldn’t figure out a way to get rid of those initial 0’s. who needs ‘em?

Posted in Plugins | Tags: calendar, Plugins, upcoming events, wordpress | 52 Comments »

How to set up Wordpress on a Wampserver

Monday, October 6th, 2008

Recently, someone asked me how to set up a local Wamp server on their computer so they can test Wordpress sites locally before uploading and editing online. MakeUseOf nicely explained what a Wamp server is and how to set it up. I wanted to expand their explanation to include setting up Wordpress.

What is this Wamp business?

According to MakeUseOf, WAMP stands for Windows Apache, MySQL and PHP.

A great majority of websites are run by a trio of services – Apache, MySQL and PHP. Apache is the web server, which handles browser requests and sends the information across the internet to your browser. PHP is the programming language that many sites are written in – this creates dynamic content which in turn is sent to Apache, which sends the data to your browser. And finally, MySQL is the database which stores the information for programs. PHP is used to access this database.

How to Set up a Wamp Server

Step 1

Download the WampServer.

Step 2

Run the installer, using the default options provided.

Step 3

Double click the Wamp icon on your desktop .

On your taskbar, near the time in the bottom right corner of your desktop, left click on the semicircle button and Click “Put online”.

How to set up Wordpress on your Wamp

Step 1

Download Wordpress. Extract the files.

Left click on the semicircle on your taskbar.

Open up the www directory.

Drag the Wordpress folder into the www directory.

Step 2

1.  Open PHPmyadmin from your wamp menu

2. Create a new Database (‘wordpress‘ or ‘blog‘ are good). Leave Collation. Click Create.

3.  Click the Home icon in the upper left to return to the main page, then click Privileges. If a user relating to WordPress does not already exist in the list of users, create one:

1. Click Add a new User.
2. Chose a username for WordPress (‘admin’ is good) and enter it in the User name field. (Be sure Use text field: is selected from the dropdown.)
3. For Host, select Local and type in localhost
4. Choose a difficult-to-guess password and enter it in the Password field. (Be sure Use text field: is selected from the dropdown.) Re-enter the password in the Re-type field.
5. Write down the username and password you chose.
6. Leave all options under Global privileges at their defaults.
7. Click Go.

4. Return to the Privileges screen and click the Check privileges icon on the user you’ve just created for WordPress. In the Database-specific privileges section, select the database you’ve just created for WordPress under the Add privileges to the following database dropdown. The page will refresh with privileges for that database. Click Check All to select all privileges, and click Go.

5. On the resulting page, make note of the host name listed after Server: at the top of the page. (This will usually be localhost.)

6. Returning to where you extracted the WordPress package, rename the file wp-config-sample.php to wp-config.php.

7. Open the renamed wp-config.php file in your favorite text editor. Here’s a screenshot of how the wp-config.php is set up.

8. Fill in the following information

DB_NAME
The name of the database you created for WordPress. (ex. Wordpress)
DB_USER
The username you created for WordPress (ex. admin)
DB_PASSWORD
The password you chose for the WordPress username.
DB_HOST
The hostname you determined  (usually localhost)

9. Save the file.

10.  Run the install scrip by copying and pasting this URL into your browser http://localhost/wordpress/wp-admin/install.php

Step 3

Hooray! Hopefully all went according to plan.

Treat yourself to a nice cold beer.

Posted in Good Blogging Practice, Tips | Tags: localhost, server, Wamp, wordpress | 42 Comments »