Tag: wordpress

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Integrating Koko Analytics stats by Mikko Saari (relevanssi.com)
It’s possible to integrate all kinds of external data to Relevanssi weights. Koko Analytics is a great analytics plugin. It collects stats about your visitors and stores them in the local database, which means those stats are available for Relevanssi. For some sites, this makes a lot of sense. For...

I have been using Koko Analytics on The New Leaf Journal since 2020 and I also use it on this site. Moreover, I use Relevanssi Light to improve on WordPress’s (sub-standard) default search after having briefly used the much heavier and more robust Relevanssi plugin. While I plan to stick with Relevanssi Light because it is good enough for my search-improvement purposes, I was still interested to read a 2022 post by the developer of the Relevanssi plugins about “[i]ntegrating Koko Analytics stats as a factor in the weight calculations [fior Relevanssi Premium].” In short, he demonstrates a PHP snippet that would allow Relevanssi Premium users to slightly favor popular posts in searches. This is very neat and I would definitely try it if I were running Relevanssi Premium. For those of you with less intense search needs or limited resources, however, I recommend giving Relevanssi Light a try — it is as good as it is simple.

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URL as a sentence by Adam Newbold (Neatnik Notes)
I wondered about the idea of a URL being a complete sentence, and I picked up the domain newbold.is as the basis for my goofing around with the concept.

I came across an interesting post by Adam Newbold about “the idea of a URL being a complete sentence.” He picked up a domain specifically for the purpose (name.is) and created some sentence-style URLs with note-length content. While this domain is not purpose-built for that, you will note that I wrote the URL of this post in the form of a question about URL sentences. The post made me think of one WordPress-related area where these fun sentence URLs could work well; I reviewed a simple extension for having a WordPress site produce a TWTXT feed (see it in use here and on The New Leaf Journal). By default, it each post is represented with the title and short URL. However, if one went all in on Mr. Newbold’s sentence URLs and modified the TWTXT plugin to make each feed entry the full URL of the post and nothing else, it would work very nicely (note that this could be done with non-WordPress sites, I am only focusing on WordPress since that is what I use for my two projects).

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This site and The New Leaf Journal are self-hosted WordPress sites. I have never really used WordPress.com. However, I made a WordPress.com account around the time I started The New Leaf Journal in 2020 for some reason I no longer remember (maybe it had to do with Gravatar, although that is moot now). I gave up on maintaing my now-former Osmosfeed aggregator on GitHub because figuring out why it was not building required too much time and effort for a project that I want to be low maintenance. Instead, I decided to finally take advantage of having the ability to make a free WordPress.com site. Behold, my free WordPress.com aggregator site that shows off my supreme full site editor skills: The Pressed Leaf Reader.

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If you have a WordPress site, you can subscribe to yourself on Minds and Minds will recognize your WordPress account as a follower. In order to this, you need the ActivityPub and Friends plugins, both available in the regular WordPress plugin repos

After both are configured, go into your Friends admin menu and add a new friend. Add your Minds account in the following format:

@[username]@minds.com

From the WordPress side, you can “subscribe” to your Minds account. I checked from the Minds side and it recognized my WordPress site as a new subscriber/follower.

Caveat: There is a quirk with multi-user WordPress sites. I set my default user on my site to my administrator account (not hidden in this case so not a big deal) and subscribed with my user account. From the Minds side, it recognizes admin account as subscriber even though from the WordPress side I subscribed as user.

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Birthday Gift by Matt Mullenweg (Matt Mullenweg)
Publish a post. About anything! It can be long or short, a photo or a video, maybe a quote or a link to something you found interesting. Don’t sweat it. Just blog. Share something you created, or amplify something you enjoyed. It doesn’t take much. The act of publishing will be a gift for you and me.

I came across a blog post titled Just Blog by Frank Meeuwsen. This post alerted me to an interesting “birthday” project by WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg. Mr. Mulenwig asked for people to blog for his birthday and link to his post. Ideally, the links should show up as pingbacks on his article. His post said that pingbacks would be closed on January 11 (unfortunately I only read Mr. Meeuwsen’s post on the 13th), but I figured I would try sending one. I like what Mr. Mullenweg is doing and it is making me think of some interesting ideas in the blogroll/webring sphere. If this pingback happens to work — this site is for my short-form writing. My long-form writing is available at The New Leaf Journal. Both sites are powered by WordPress and hosted on a Hetzner VPS server.

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Show Pages ID (WordPress Plugin) by YYDevelopment (YYDevelopment)
Description Show Pages IDs is a plugin that will show allow you to view the IDs of pages and posts in wordpress. With Show Pages IDs plugin you will be able to views the pages and posts IDs in the top admin menu bar and in the back-end admin panel as well. Show Pages IDs Plugin Features Reveal pages...
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I use YYDevelopment’s free (including of cost) and open source WordPress plugin, Show Pages ID, both here and on The New Leaf Journal. I received a dismissible banner on my plugin page asking for a WordPress review. What about an on-site review? Show Pages ID is a very simple plugin that adds a field to the WordPress admin screen for posts that shows the post’s numerical ID. It also covers pages and custom post types. Not every site needs to know post IDs, but I have at least one plugin on both of my WordPress sites for which I need post IDs. The plugin is lightweight (only adds one option to the site) and written in pure PHP (see details). I recommend it if you need an easy way to see post ID numbers as of December 7, 2023.

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The Classic Editor in WordPress by Jack Baty (Baty.net)
I thought for sure I would finally settle in with WordPress for a while, but Gutenberg always annoys. Some of it is handy, but mostly I just feel frustrated when writing anything more than a paragraph or two. Several people, noticing my frustration, recommended that I try the Classic Editor plugin, so that’s what I’m doing now.

I am using the Classic Editor here at The Emu Café Social, in large part because some of the IndieWeb plugins I am using require it instead of Gutenberg. I agree with this take by Mr. Baty in a vacuum that  the classic editor is better for writing than Gutenberg. However, I use Gutenberg over at my main WordPress-powered project, The New Leaf Journal. The reasons are two-fold:

  1. Drafting articles in markdown (I like Ghostwriter) and converting them using Pandoc for use on WordPress provides a superior workflow to both Gutenberg and the Classic Editor.
  2. Because I draft my long articles outside of WordPress (with a few exceptions), I am more concerned with formatting. Gutenberg works better for me for that purpose than the TinyMCE editor.

(I will note, however, that Gutenberg footnotes almost cost me a great deal of work on a recent project.)

I spent more of my life than I would like to admit figuring out how to add my own footer text to our theme, which is a child theme of SemPress. But mission accomplished. With our child theme and my initial style tweaks done, I published version 1.0 of the newly-named Emusem Press to my personal Gitea repository. My last tasks before really getting the ball rolling on this project are to publish the rest of our informational pages and resolve one plugin-related issue. “Getting the ball rolling” is defined as posts about things other than designing the site.

I had a long day of working on the site. On the down side, I am having some technical issues with a couple of our key plugins that I want to resolve before starting in earnest. At the moment, it seems like Post Kinds is a hard dependency for certain post types working when I have Friends installed. While I am inclined to use Post Kinds, I do not want to be in a situation where I have a hard dependency on a plugin. The issue could be something that I did on set-up, but I am investigating. On the good side, however, I refined the format of the site. We may still have some readability issues (I am trying to find where to slightly increase the font size), but i think I found a nice color scheme to complement our system font stack (the font stack was not my first choice going in, but it reads better than my first choice with the layout). I would like to widen the post blocks down the line. File that issue away.

WordPress pages (as opposed to posts) do not have pingback and trackback support by default. I had a need to enable it on The New Leaf Journal in order to allow certain pages to accept incoming Webmentions. In that case, I added the PHP snippet to my child theme’s functions.php file. But with multiple sites and the possibility that I may not always use the same theme, I decided to convert the snippet into a site-specific plugin. The code is available in my personal Gitea repository. Feel free to use and extend (instructions for extending are in the code comments).