Theres several options for tracking how many visitors you have on your blog from server side apps such as Awstats and Webalizer, to stand alone apps such as haveamint (for a $30 premium), aswell as integrated stats from google analytics. Down to plugins such as Wass Up.

On most of my sites I use a combination of Awstats, Mint and Google Analytics. Currently on WP Core I only use the Wass Up plugin.

I just got wind of a new stats app called Woopra Apparently debut at the recent WordCamp dallas. Just from checking the screenshot and demo’s this looks like a fantastic application and a possible mint killer?

At the moment it’s in beta and invite only. If anyone is in the beta program and would be kind enough to send me an invite to contact [at] wpcore [dot com] So I could give it a more thourough review that would be greatly appreciated.

Geekbrief.tv have a nice video review up of Woopra:

http://www.geekbrief.tv/introducing-woopra-youre-gonna-want-it

We recently had the need to limit the length of Posts, titles in a WordPress Theme, this is what we came up with:

Replace:

From within your loop with the following:

 "40" )
	{
		echo substr($the_title, 0, 40) . "...";
	} else
	{
		echo $the_title;
	}
?>

Full example

The first part will check for titles with a length of 40 characters and more, and the second part will limit any titles to 40 chars with “…” at the end.

So if you wanted to limit titles to 20 characters change the two instances of 40 to 20.

Stating the obvious here, but as you can see I just switched to a custom Design for WP Core. This theme is actually a filler while another design is being worked on. I’ll probably release this one for free once that one is ready

This is a small announcement to say I’ll be working on a new PasteBin WP Dump. What has that got to do with the title? Honestly nothing, but it’s not far from alot of peoples reactions when another Pastebin pops up. Without revealing to much I plan on integrating it more so with WordPress to hopefully make it that little bit more useful for WordPress developers.

WP Dump is currently powered by a python/Django backend with an extjs front end. The plan at the moment is porting the frontend over to a new php backend then working on some plugins.

I want to thank trbs for letting me use his code from Ext Paste for the project.

I also want to thank Nick, from Palmnet for offering to help with the project.

Hopefully this will become a useful resource for WordPress developers and not just “another” Pastebin =)

I decided to move this blog from bluehost to a more developer friendly host WebFaction and in the process switch to using the latest trunk from the wordpress svn. Updating WordPress is now a breeze via SSH, it’s simply a matter of typing ’svn-update’ from the main wpcore directory (Currently running 2.5-RC1.1 Trunk Revision 7502 =)

I recently announced I’m working on several new projects, one of those being the recently put online wpsource.com. Interestingly enough just yesterday adii posted about a similar concept and Jeffro2pt0 posted about them both
I personally love a bit of “friendly” competition and will consider all feedback received. The fact wpsource is already up gives me a slight edge. Changing the layout’s and adding features is pretty trivial.

An interesting point Jeffro made was about consolidating several feeds into one. I thought about this but decided against it as a lot of blogs like to use feedburner to keep track of there RSS Subscriber count and probably wouldn’t be very happy if they saw a significant dip in direct RSS readers and it also plays a factor in a blogs worth if and when it comes to selling up.

So at the moment this is the area I would most like to gage site owners feedback. I’ll also be adding favicons shortly but I have another project I plan on announcing later that needs some tweaking before I publish the URL

Everytime I install a copy of WordPress on a site I have set of tasks I always complete before I start writing posts, I’ll be talking you through those with a quick 5 minute guide to optimize a fresh install of WordPress:

1) First things first update the Permalinks so there seo friendly:

login to your wp-admin -> Settings -> Permalinks

Select ‘Custom Structure’ and enter:
/%category%/%postname%/

More info on permalinks here

2) Next let’s update the ping list:

Why? This will help get various search engines to crawl your site as soon as you have created a new post and Index it quicker.
go to Settings -> Writing and at the bottom in the text area under “Update Services” replace it with the list from this post: Pinging update services

3) Next were going to add a google sitemap

head over here download site sitemap plugin, upload it to wp-content/plugins via ftp and activate in wp-admin -> plugins

4) Finally were going to create a Feedburner account.

So head over and sign up, once you have created your account and burnt your feed we need to redirect our WordPress feeds to our new feedburner feed, do this with the Feedsmith Feedburner plugin, again upload it to your plugin folder and activate in the wp-admin.

All you need now is a theme, theres thousands of free ones, but a great place to start is looking through this list on smashing magazine

Now your all ready to post. Theres alot more you can do once your blogs running to improve seo and such. This was just a basic guide for fresh installs, if you found this post useful consider subscribing to our RSS Feed

Update: This post was indexed by google within 20 minutes of being published

WP Designer was recently put up for auction on sitepoint with a $65,000 BIN (Buy It Now). It was only listed for about a day and a half or so before getting a BIN offer. Small Potato has just announced the new owner of WP Designer, Pawel Ciszewski. It will be interesting to see how the site progresses as Devlounge wrote an interesting article about some of the dangers of buying a blog.

Small Potato will be on tonights WordPress Weekly Podcast.

Peroozing WP Source for updates and a post on howtospoter titled “How to get $27,497 In One Hour” caught my attention. Not going to lie I quickly headed on over to see what the post was about. Well done you got me.

Ok, so it’s not WordPress related.. Except for the blog witch is… Ok The blog is actually powered by Movable Type. CSS Mania possibly the number #1 CSS Showcase established 4 years ago is currently for sale on sitepoint for a staggering $500,000. Go take a look!