AFdN Updates

Information concerning the website

Countdown Timer v1.95 Technical Preview

Okay folks, this is a technical preview of version 2.0 of the Countdown Timer.

The biggest change is that timers can now countdown automagically with JavaScript. Now, a word on the JS. This is the first version and there are only two modes: on and off. That means that you can’t change the format of the Javascript countdown (it will always display the years, months, days, hours, minutes, and seconds). I’m working on an elegant solution to this problem and would welcome any code, comments, suggestions, feedback, etc.

Other updates include:

  • Tabbed $afdnOptions array to make it more readable
  • Fixed strtotime typo
  • Brought time display inline with current WordPress practice. This fixes the dreaded timezone glitch.
  • Strip non-sig zeros option added
  • Fixed bug where “No dates present” would _not_ show if the data was returned instead of echo’d

In terms of stability, everything seems fine; I am currently using this Technical Preview on AFdN.

Download the file and try the goodness

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Updates to AFdN

WordPress 2.3 was released earlier today (i.e Monday) and I spent some quality time backing up and then upgrading to that. I also upgraded and purged a bunch of the plugins and upgraded the theme to it’s latest version (which now supports widgets).

The biggest thing is the addition of Tags, which are kind of like keywords. It’s going to be interesting to get used to them, but it should be fun.

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Force User Field Registration v0.11

Really just a bug fix…but worth mentioning:

  • Fixed hardcoded database entry
  • Updated homepage link
  • Hosting switched to separate entity (i.e. no longer under fergcorp directory on svn)


Read more or download it!

Note to self…I need to automate plugin updates.

[tags]wordpress, force user field registration, register, registration, plugin[/tags]

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Countdown Timer v1.9

This is a pretty spectacular release if you ask me. Things fixed and some new goodies:

  • One-off countdown timers (i.e. standalone timers for posts, etc)
  • Ability to customize timer style
  • Added “week” as a unit of time
  • Even more bug fixes

The biggest bug quashed is the one where if the plugin was in a directory other then the plugin directory, it really wouldn’t work.

Read more or download it!

[tags]Wordpress, countdown timer, plugins, widget[/tags]

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Feed Burp

There was a burp with the feed was brought to my attention this evening.

The burp has been fixed.

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Countdown Timer v1.8

This is a pretty spectacular release if you ask me. Tons of things fixed and lots of new goodies:

  • Built in widget! No need to download and activate another plugin!
  • Ability to select any combination of years, days, hours, minutes, and seconds to display
  • Internationalization support
  • Default settings automatically set on activation
  • More accurate countdown mechanism (you wouldn’t think counting could be so hard)

Read more or download it!

[tags]Wordpress, countdown timer, plugins, widget[/tags]

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Blog Advertising

Every so often, I get a request seeing if I’d like to put an advertisement on my website. It’s tempting sometimes, one little harmless ad to help offset the cost of hosting my site (it’s something like $100/year for everything). But I don’t, and you will never see any advertisements on my blog (save the Amazon affiliate linking and things of that nature that are unobtrusive). This site is first and foremost my blog. Its existence is to serve as a repository for the random bits of life I choose to store here. It is not a commercial venture.

Jeff Atwood had a great post on Blog Advertising a couple months ago and I want to reiterate one of his points:

From www.codinghorror.com:

Realize that advertising changes the nature of your blog. The first ads you take convert your blog from a non-profit to a commercial venture. It’s no longer a hobby; you’re being paid to blog. It’s work. And unless you’re only accepting only random ads, there are also new avenues for conflicts of interest.

This goes back to my point about this not being a commercial venture, but rather a place for the random bits of my life. The random bits of my life do not have any sort of advertisements as part of them.

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Password

The password for the previous post is the name of the city in which I was born, in all lowercase.

Mostly to thwart Google indexing the page and also to keep it somewhat private.

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Year End Stats

End of year report for 2006:

  • # of Posts: 503 (down 32.3% from last year)
  • # of Comments 884 (up 198.65% from last year)
  • Bandwidth: 23.76 GB (down 32.69% from last year)
  • # of unique visitors: ~76421 (up 75.15% from last year)
  • # of visits: 183258 (up 92.49% from last year)
  • # of pages: 741231 (up 55.09% from last year)
  • # of hits: 1554381 (down 2.35% from last year)
  • 68.3% use Windows (down 9.54% from last year)
  • 45.4% use Internet Explorer (down 19.36% from last year)
  • 24.6% use Firefox (up 32.97% from last year)

While my actually number of posts were down, site popularity increased. This was also the first full year that I’ve used flickr, so bandwidth was also decreased quite a bit. I’ve very happy about the almost 200% increase in comments. That means people are reacting to what I say…which is part of the point of having a blog (although not always the point).

http://www.wp-plugins.org lead the referals links.

Google was the most used search engine to reach my site.

Inktomi Slurp (Yahoo!’s crawler) was the most active bot on my site.

Top Ten Search Keyphrases for 2006:

  1. countdown time
  2. andrew ferguson
  3. wisdom teeth
  4. stevie starr
  5. mr t facts
  6. mr. t facts
  7. netflix lawsuit
  8. wordpress countdown
  9. mr t 30 facts
  10. happy anniversary

Top Ten Search Keywords for 2006:

  1. countdown
  2. timer
  3. wordpress
  4. ferguson
  5. facts
  6. t
  7. andrew
  8. starr
  9. stevie
  10. mr
  11. wisdom
  12. teeth
  13. plugin
  14. the
  15. 30
  16. of
  17. facebook
  18. mr.
  19. to
  20. top
  21. regurgitator
  22. for
  23. in
  24. a
  25. blog

As reported by AWStats and mySQL.

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