I haven’t posted anything lately for two reasons: sunshine and I visited Austin for the weekend and I have recently started work on my graduate application process. While in Austin, I took the time to install a few usability plugins in the blog.

First, I installed a post view counter called WP-PostViews. You will notice right next to the comments link at the bottom of each post, there is a count for the number of times a post has been viewed. This count is not updated if a user is logged in, so these view counts are strictly for guests only.

Second, I just installed a spell checking plugin for the Write admin page. I chose not to make this available for comment posts because it accesses system resources and I want to limit who can access this feature. So far, it appears to be working fine. It did however point out a glaring problem: you can install aspell without installing a dictionary. To do so in gentoo, for English speaking users, emerge the aspell-en package.

Next, I installed a Google Sitemap generator. I don’t know how much more traffic this brings in versus running a site without it because I have not installed a web stats tracker. Before the shift, we were pulling about 15-18K hits a month. I’ll try to get some metrics on visitors at a later point in time (volunteers welcome).

Then, I installed a MasterWish plugin. MasterWish aims to tracks a user’s wishlist for any site or any product. Very ambitious but it seems to work with a lovely bookmark that snags everything off a page that it can. I found a bug in the plugin that refused to list the wishlist contents and reported it. Within 2 days, I received a response from the author that it had been corrected. You can check out the testing page here. I still think it should automatically show the list selected on the admin page, but I have to wait and see if the developer responds to that suggestion as well.

Then I tried to find something that would track my collection of media such as books, CDs, DVDs, and games. I stumbled across a plugin called Addictions, which seemed to more or less do just that. When I installed it and checked out the admin page, there was no lookup method. I had to enter all of the information manually. That basically renders the plugin useless. I discussed an idea with rainman about creating an application that performed automatic lookups and generated an RSS feed. Then a WordPress plugin could be written to consume this feed and present it on the user’s blog. Sadly, I haven’t found anything suitable yet.

I’ve also found a few neat new themes, but I doubt I’ll have time to installed them right now. Perhaps at a later time and date. For now, I must continue working on my statement of purpose.