Donation Plugin Project Initiative picks first project: User-Agent-String.info
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Did you know that…?
- Currently there are aproximately 175 different browsers (included mobile ones) without counting every different version of each browser? In fact, the mobile era brought a new breed of browsers which were added to the always growing browsers list. From Android, passing through Blackberries, Kindle, Motorola, Opera, Nokia, or Polaris to mention a few, the browser business is hotter than ever.
- There are around 440 different spiders crawling the web 24 hours to get all your blog data indexed? (and not counting different versions of each one!) Rigth now your site is getting indexed thanks to multiples bots scouring the web.
- There are at least 91 different Operative Systems (without counting service packs or numbering versions)?
- - There are at least 130 Ip addresses you should ignore when analyzing where your users are coming from?
(Data estimation from User Agent String info)
When you are surfing on the web, you are identifying yourself. Well, sort of. Your browser
is providing some pieces of information to every web site you are visiting such as browser version, your Operative system, your default language, and so on.
But the web is not just users. There are many software all around, crawling the web, collecting information
from here and there. This programs also have its own ‘signatures’ to identify them. There are spiders, crawlers,
feed readers, scrappers, email clients, libraries, vaidators , even anonimyzers…you name it. Each one is providing a signature with information.
This signature (aka User Agent String) is where StatComm analyzes to provide an accurate vision of incoming traffic. Identify the pieces of information is crucial to understand the traffic.
But here is the problem: every browser has its custom signature and you can expect more and more browsers and new versions in the horizon. That is making more and more difficult to indentify rightfully the proper signature.
User Agent String Info to rescue.
The site provides a nice way to give information directly from a UA string, so you can play with the features that site provides. But there is more: UAS Info has an up-to-date database you can download to analyze incoming UAS and also many programming examples in several languages to test the features yourself.
StatComm currently has implemented a class to retrieve UA database and use this information to provide an accurate view of the incoming traffic.
So we’ve decided that User Agent String Info will be the first winner on the donation project. (More about The Donation Plugin Project here)
Congratulations to Jaroslav Mallat for his commitment work and thanks for your help to make StatComm more accurate.
WordPressReady goes to WPGetReady
Some years ago, the idea of choosing WordPressReady as domain name, seemed to be a good one. But after the awesome growth of WordPress, it turned into a bad decision. Due a trademark problem , be owner a domain with wordpress name on it is a call to headaches. I received mails from Theme Reviewers, directly from WordPress and also there is a warning when I sign in the WordPress.org plugin forums. Moreover, this site could be related with s-p-a-m-m-y sites and m-a-l-w-a-r-e software related to the trademark. (The statistics produced by StatComm and Akismet seems to confirm that a lot of mal-ware and spa-m is already redirected to the site for such reason). Since we are serious about contributing to WordPress , we considered moving our blog elsewhere.
WPGetReady going up
To avoid being in middle of trademarks issues, we decided to change the domain name to WpGetReady.com. There is nothing there yet. This is an early reminder and we’ll warn you when the switch is flipped.
This was a tough decision, since we went back and forth selecting a new appropriate domain name from the names available (a lot were considered to find that a LOT were already taken) without destroying OUR trademark and site current traffic.
WpGetReady.com will be active from May 1, and we’ll start redirecting the traffic to that site. Three months later we’ll deactivate WordPressReady.com domain.
The forum will be also redirected, we hope the transition will be smooth. Stay tuned.
Thanks to all & enjoy the day.
The Donation Plugin Project
Since we starting developing plugins, we’ve been taking some time looking inside out many open projects and we found some of them worth watching and also a learning experience. We were thinking what could be a way to support all those projects growing around the world.
Being said that, we decided to pick regularly some projects and make a little contribution. Nothing to make anyone rich, but a starting point to make visible unique projects or very useful ones.
We have defined some rules for this event:
Changes are coming…
In the next days , I will start a series of post about statistics. I invested a great deal of time listening to the questions of lot of users about statistics and plugins and I got a few interesting conclusions that I will publish shortly. This heavy task has delayed my intention of regular posting, although I’m confident I will do it from now on.
Things aside, I’ve been changing the site, following users suggestions, adapting a new theme and also a Forum has arrived.
Lastly, I published a plugin on the WordPress Repository (Text to Custom Fields) , in what I think is the start of producing a lot of contribution to the WordPress Community.
This post is more a zero-point reference for the things to come, and also is for ‘pinging’ the blog and say something like ‘hey there!’.
Thanks and have a great day.
Google Trends on WordPress
A asked myself a question: How does WordPress position itself in relation to other CMS systems?. For this I turned to Google Trends which compared three popular CMS systems: WordPress, Joomla and Drupal.
The results are interesting. It shows that at some point in the year 2009, the constantly raising WordPress exceeded Joomla trend. Joomla in turn has started a slight decline, while Drupal although slightly below, maintains a continuous growth curve, far from its rivals.
