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WP3.2

On Independence Day WordPress 3.2 saw the light of day. This is quite a drastic upgrade, since the server software requirements have been raised to levels that are not supported by my host in the standard setup. Through a ‘trick’ I have been using PHP5 for a while, but a more serious trick was needed to use MySQL 5.2.4 or higher. I took care of that a little while ago. It costed a lot of work. So far the upgrade seems to have gone flawlessly. I did some basic testing and so far have not found anything funky. Should you run into something, go the contact page and send me an email so I can have a look at it.

Stats

Every now and then I feel the need to have a look at the site statistics, usually when I do, I do not have access to my host’s statistics, but the statistics per section are more interesting anyway.
Read More »Stats

All done?

It looks like I am about finished with the transfer to the other database. It was quite a job to get all the wrong characters right, but I think I found them all. Should you run into something that looks weird, please let me know. As far as I know now, there is one thing yet unsolved and that is the top-rated music reviews list that I temporarily deleted.

And yet more anti spam

I am getting so tired of cleaning the spam queues every time that I decided to install the dreaded “captcha”, you know, an image or question that you have to type over in order to be able to submit something. (By the way, did you know that “captcha” is short for “completely automated public Turing-test to tell computers and humans apart”? Who the hell came up with that?) It looks like it that I found a plugin that only shows a captcha image when a comment would be marked as spam. Normal visitors should not see them! Should that work, that would be awesome. So, should:

Sorry, but it looks like you are a spambot. Please complete the CAPTCHA below to prove that you are human.

What are the fifth and sixth characters of the following sequence?

with a line of number, something does not work right (or you are a spammer). Please contact me when you are unable to leave comments.

Likes

Last week somebody asked me if I got much reaction to what I write here, a question that I had to answer negatively. Gangleri.nl has 100 to 120 visitors (not hits) a day. The Facebook ‘integration’ has been here for about a month and a half. This means that about 9000 to 11000 people visited Gangleri.nl since. A substantial part of internet users supposedly have an account. 40% Of the Americans have one according to Wikipedia, in Europe I guess the number will not be much lower. That means that in the month and a half some 3600 to 4400 FB users visited these pages and 16 of them hit the “like” button (and I know some of them did not use the button on the website, but on the FB Gangleri.nl page), that is a participation percentage of about 0,375%? So far for boosting the participation of your visitors using FB as some claim!
The same goes for the FB page, by the way. When I post something there, there are 16 people reading it on their walls, but a day later the posts have been read over 40 times. Are these of the 16 ‘likers’ or do people simply bookmark the FB page without ‘liking’ it?
This is no complaint, by the way, just a conclusion. Perhaps there are more people like me who do not necessarily have all their information on one place (for example at their FB account), perhaps people prefer feeds, perhaps many visitors of Gangleri.nl are one-time visitors, perhaps you only come when you feel like it or Gangleri.nl visitors form a group of people not fond of social media. All possibilities. Just something I had to think about when I got the question.

Less Facebook integration

All this FB stuff does not entirely work the way I want. It took a few efforts to get ‘recommend’ buttons for posts rather than my FB page, but now I notice that as soon as a post is ‘recommended’ all are. Also I cannot get statistics to work for this, so I only see “1 person recommends this” and that is it. Because I have not found a sollution, I decided to delete the whole recommend function. When you still want to recommend something from this website, you can go to the FB page (see on the right) where the latest additions are mentioned. As for the rest, I need 30 ‘likers’ of the FB page to get statistics there, so come on people 🙂

New anti spam measure

Sigh, spam is somewhat of a dayjob when having a website. I have two plugins that should be activated by default, Bad Behavior and Akismet. However Akismet seldom lets any spam through, I have a staggering amount of spam in my spam queue (that should actually be caught by Bad Behavior before it even gets there) since I disabled the plugin called “Cookies For Comments” that even prevented myself from making comments. Because of the large number of spam that manage to dodge Bad Behavior, I activated another third anti spam plugin. Hopefully this one will do the trick. Should it somehow block comments again, please go to the website intro where you can see contact details to inform me about this.

Sorry, your comment has not been accepted

Argh, how long ago did I install this “cookies for comments” plugin? I just noticed that it blocked even myself with the error “sorry, your comment has not been accepted”. I deleted the plugin, but please let me know when you encounter such a thing so that I do not have to accidentally find out about it myself after too much time.

Stats

Suddenly I wanted to have a look at my stats. Just to have you enjoy the figures…:
In the last week, the main part (index and intro) had an average of 73 unique visitors per day; the articles section 170, bookreviews 115, filmreviews 114, musicreviews 123 and the news section 14. Overall that comes to an average of 122 unique visitors per day for the entire website, based on my WordPress stats of course.
Other funny facts: hits on the main site are about twice the number of unique visitors (so I guess people do read the index and the intro), articles have twice to two-and-a-half the number of hits against visitors, books too, the filmreviews section has real browsers with six to seven times the number of hits in comparison to unique visitors, music reviews too and the news section has a very low number of visitors, even for the RSS (70 per day). The musicreviews section is relatively popular among feed-readers.
Recently I did some Facebook integration, but this has no effect whatsoever. As far as I can tell, no posts have been “shared” yet, and there is only one website visitor who “like”s Gangleri.nl, the other three ‘likers’ came from my own FB account. So far for “boosting contact with your visitors”!

Facebook integration

I am fooling around a little with Facebook integration. I made a Facebook page where I built in the news feed, so FB users can stay up to date. On ‘single view’ pages on this website, I made “recommend” buttons (which I prefer over “like”). It is hard to test everything with but a ‘webmaster’ profile, so if you could mess around a little with these “recommend” buttons, since I have the idea that they do not work properly yet.
I am not sure if I will build in commenting with FB accounts. Anyone can already comment here and that feature will be a lot more work.