Monthly Archives: February 2005

Stat Wars

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With the release of WordPress v1.5, the battle to develop the number-one stats plugin has begun. Owen Winkler’s BAStats (download) is looking very promising. BAStats is the new kid on the block, but Owen has already packed it with features. BAStats is currently in the alpha stage of development. As a surprise, Randy Peterman has returned to the development of StatTraq. StatTraq is the former power-house of WordPress stats, but is not functional in WordPress v1.5 without the addition of a few hacks. Randy is currently taking suggestions for the next version of StatTraq and is planning to implement a fast and possibly javascript-powered interface. As for myself, I am currently happy with with StatCounter, though I do plan to switch to either BAStats or StatTraq v2 in the near future. It will be interesting to see how far along these two stat plugins are in a month’s time.

A WordPress Plugin Tutorial

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If you’re interested in writing your own WordPress plugins, look no further than Owen’s tutorial, How to Write a Simple WordPress Plugin. As an additional reference, you may want to read Carthik’s Plunge Into Plugins. If you’re looking for free text editor for your platform, take a look through this list. If you’re looking for other WordPress plugins, stop by the official Plugin Repository and the unofficial Plugins Database.

A Dive Through the Blogroll

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Out of nothing but sheer boredom, I decided to take a dive through my Blogroll. Here are the highlights from this evening’s dive:

Bryan returns from vacation and finds that my keyword moderation list is quite helpful while he’s away. Owen advocates the necessity of using digital transfer methods when stealing source code. Michael gathers twenty-five games which have influenced his life. Ian is putting the finishing touches on his new design. Rick discovers that his iLife is in iHell. Craig finds that cattle calls don’t work well for moose. Orson questions the effectiveness of democracy. Chris adds some personalized flavor to his comments. Tom solves his referrer spam problem. And, Podz discovers that he has been sober for 730 days. Way to go, Podz!

Favored Freeware: VLC

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VLC (initially VideoLAN Client) is a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, …) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It can also be used as a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network.

Pros: VLC supports almost every video format and has an easy-to-use interface. VLC is a cross-platform application for Mac, Windows, Linux, BeOS, Fedora Core, YOPY/Linupy, and Zaurus.

Cons: The Mac releases tend to be a bit buggy.

Kubrick Header Image Generator

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Kubrickr is a tool that lets you replace that giant blue blob at the top of your WordPress 1.5 blog with a nice photo from Flickr. Simply type some words that relate to your blog and push Submit. Choose one of the photos from the that appears, and save the resulting file to your Default WordPress theme directory. It’s that easy!

According to the developer, Kubrickr uses user-specified tags to search Flickr for Creative Commons-licensed images, allows the user to select which part of the image to use, and then does all the hard to work to present the user with a new kubrickheader.jpg. This looks like a lot of fun.