I used to think people watched too much

I used to think people watched too much TV. Now I think people read too many blogs about TV shows. But now I have the stats to back that up.

Watching 300

Me: “You never say stuff like that when I go off to work.” Her: “What, like ‘come back with your laptop or on it’?”

WordPress Search plugin

My Google Summer of Code 2009 student, Justin Shreve, has done an excellent job creating a new search API for WordPress. We hope this API will be integrated into the WordPress core because it would simplify replacing the core search functionality and encourage developers to create many more options for searching blogs.

Justin’s Search plugin is actually a package of three plugins. The first plugin installs the API that lets other plugins do the searching. The other two plugins use the API to provide search systems that we think will please most users who are dissatisfied with the built-in WordPress search results: MySQL Fulltext and Google Custom Search. (The Google plugin requires a Google account.) For the search-savvy, Justin also wrote a Sphinx-based plugin, Sphinx Search. This last one involves installing additional software on the server.

I’m running the Fulltext plugin on my personal blog so you can try it. Enter a search in the sidebar. On the search results page you can refine your search by specifying whether to search posts, pages, and comments. You can also sort the results by relevance, date, or alphabet. The Advanced Search link leads to a form where you can specify author, categories, tags, and date range.

Self-hosted WordPress users can install Search. (It is not available for WordPress.com… yet.) After activating the main Search plugin you must also activate one of the other plugins: MySQL Fulltext, Google Custom Search, or Sphinx Search. We are anxious to know what you think of it. Justin plans to continue to improve the search system so he will need lots of user feedback.

Real-time WordPress.com subscription

Sometimes RSS isn’t fast enough. We’ve been experimenting with faster blog subscription delivery using Jabber to push the messages. When you use Jabber to subscribe to blogs you get the news as soon as it is published. Now almost every post and comment on WordPress.com blogs is published this way and you can subscribe to these streams using almost any Jabber client. Messages are delivered typically within one second of publication. You can also publish to your blogs by typing instant messages. Soon comments will be appearing in Jabber chat rooms.

Let me break it down. Jabber (XMPP) is an instant messaging protocol. There are dozens of free clients (programs) that can connect to Jabber services, thousands of Jabber servers, and millions of daily Jabber users around the world. Even some phones can connect to it, including the iPhone with an appropriate app. So you can probably use Jabber. The primary exception is people behind company or government firewalls that block XMPP ports, but we’ll have a web-based solution for them soon.

Before I give you a link I have to tell you that this service is experimental. If you use it, you are a tester so please wear your white lab coat. A few dozen people have been using it for several months with very few hiccups, but hiccups are still to be expected. Even so, most of us at Automattic rely on it daily to surface and accelerate the discussions on our private blogs. Finally I must tell you that we have not yet worked out all the business angles, so the feature set and limitations may change to accommodate our inevitable need to feed the monkey.

Now I give you im.wordpress.com, which I demonstrated at the CrunchUp last week. Every WordPress.com account is automatically linked to a Jabber account on im.wordpress.com. We have compiled instructions for setting up some popular Jabber clients.

If you want my personal recommendation for a Jabber client, my choice for Mac OS X is Adium. If you already use iChat, just stick with iChat. Some of my coworkers who run Windows have chosen Pidgin. I also sometimes use Psi, which is available for Mac, Windows, and Linux.

Here is some info for people familiar with XMPP. This service is based on XEP-0060 (Publish-Subscribe) acting as a front-end for WordPress blogs. It started as a simple firehose for our commercial partners and grew from there. People subscribing with Jabber clients don’t need Pubsub. They send simple commands to a chat bot and their items are delivered as XHTML-IM from the blog’s URL. The bot speaks XEP-0060 on their behalf. If you can speak XEP-0060, you can connect to pubsub.im.wordpress.com and subscribe to nodes. The nodes for this blog are /blogs/andy.wordpress.com/ for posts, /blogs/andy.wordpress.com/comments/ for all comments, and /blogs/andy.wordpress.com/2009/07/16/real-time-wordpress-com-subscription/ for comments on this post. Node discovery and item discovery and retrieval are not implemented. Reasonable subscription and traffic limits will be imposed. If you are looking for a complete feed of all our blogs and comments, try the firehose.

Help test Stats 1.5 beta

At first we thought it was a good idea to use iframes to display reports in the Stats plugin. We’ve seen since then a lot of problems with browsers and cookies. To help resolve these issues, and in anticipation of future features, I am updating the plugin and the WordPress.com stats reporting system to remove the iframes. I just posted 1.5 beta 1. If you host your own WordPress 2.7+ blog and you use the Stats plugin, why not contribute to its development by installing this testing version? Anyone can download the beta but I don’t recommend it unless you are able to cope with potentially unstable software.

• What are the risks of using this beta?
  You won’t lose any stats. If something goes horribly wrong it’s probably a bad download; just reinstall the latest version of Stats.
• How does it work?
  The plugin connects to WordPress.com to get the stats reports when you request them. It uses the API key to authenticate.
• Aside from fixing cookie problems, how is this better?
  Now it’s possible for anyone who can publish posts on your blog to see blog stats. They don’t have to be logged into a WordPress.com account. They only need the publish_posts capability (Author role) to view stats reports.
• Where did the dropdown blog switcher go?
  Because the plugin uses a single API key to authenticate, the service doesn’t know whether the visitor is the owner of that key or some other user. So it doesn’t make much sense to show the list of blogs belonging to the API key owner. You can still use the switcher if you view your stats on any WordPress.com dashboard.
• Where did the Stats Access panel go?
  This is also related to single API key authentication. Maybe in future we will bring administrative access back to the plugin. But until then, we have left the Stats Access panel intact on WordPress.com dashboards. You might want to bookmark dashboard.wordpress.com if you need these features on a regular basis.
• Will this be a required upgrade?
  You mean will older version of stats be broken? Not by 1.5. Later versions may break compatibility but for now you can keep using earlier versions of Stats if you like.
• What if I install this and still see iframes?
  This happens because your server is unable to connect to WordPress.com. I set it up to use SSL (https) in the hopes that most hosts support this. If yours does not work, I’d like to hear from you and do some testing on your host.