My Love Affair With Woopra

I love looking at the analytics for my site. I love seeing what articles are most popular, what people land on the most, where they come from and where they leave.

A few months ago I learned about Woopra - a free tracking/analytics program that has a beautiful gui and some pretty freakin’ cool features.

How To Make Aardvark Add-on Work With Firefox 3!

I’m a huge, huge fan of the latest Firefox release. But I was really, really disapointed that a LOT of my very favorite (and most used!) plugins were incompatible. The plugin I felt most lost without was Aardvark, which I use every single day, practically all day long to aid me in development, editing and design.

Aardvark is a simple little Firefox plugin that when activated (right click and choose “Start Aardvark”) lets you highlight each elements on the page with a red border - not only that, a tab appears on the border with the element and id/class that is associated with it.

This plugin is critical for me (along with Firebug) when diagnosing layout problems.

Your Ideal CMS: What’s In It?

We are never satisfied with our blog software or CMS - it’s almost like an unwritten rule. We are constantly awaiting new updates and features, and when they come they are never good enough. It’s why the age old debate of Wordpress vs. Movable Type exists, and why there is never one clear winner.

So what do we really want in our Content Management Systems?

For myself I would love to see the following capabilities:

• Sweet templating system (a la Wordpress)
• Comments (preferably threaded, with an easy way to distinguish admins)
• Statistics built in (post views, exit points, referrers, # of subscriptions
• Kick ass spam management
• Easy image uploading (multiple images) - (haven’t used WP 2.5 yet to test their version of this)
• Category systems that allow you to better organize categories.
• Better back-end user interface (no winners: Movable Type, Wordpress, Joomla, Expression Engine, Textpattern, etc all fail in some points)
• Better draft and published posts editing panels
• Better documentation
• Multiple blog/site support

So, what do you want and/or need of your CMS? What doesn’t it do right now that you wish it did? What does it do, but you wish it did better?

34 Insanely Useful Wordpress Plugins for Admins

Yesterday Ben, from Binary Moon, released a new plugin that allows you to modify your WordPress login screen without worrying about it being being overwritten by future WordPress updates. This got me thinking about my very favorite adminstrative WordPress plugins that make my life easier when using WordPress. These are plugins I have used or want to use that focus on things like making the admin panel more friendly, that help organize and customize advertising, block spam, gather information, and more.

Spotplex Vs. Digg

Spotplex is a digg-like system where your blog’s articles are ranked on the amount of views they receive (which are counted by a Spotplex provided code). Every time someone “reads” (views) your post it is counted by Spotplex propelling that article up the popularity ladder.

From Spotplex:

Spotplex is the only online content aggregation service that dynamically provides an instant, impartial ranking of popular Web content. With Spotplex, Internet users are not required to change their behavior to generate content rankings. By eliminating tagging and voting, Spotplex more accurately reflects what people read most today.

Based on an algorithm-based measuring system that analyzes readers’ behavior in real time, Spotplex’s popular content rankings come from actual impressions, or “reads”. This impartial process gives every blogger a better opportunity to be heard. Spotplex also uses a relative popularity measure by which article reads are measured relative to a site’s overall traffic, rather than by volume alone. This evens the playing field so all blogs can compete equally in the Spotplex rankings, regardless of readership size or subject matter.