You can now download v0.51 at the TD Word Count page. This version adds one new section: “This Month Published Activity” which shows the published post activity by author for the current month as shown below:
If you click on the number of posts, it will reload the page with the all post stats hidden and show the detailed post counts. Also in this release:
- pages are separated out from post counts and shown (see green arrows in screenshot). The pages are still shown within the “All Stats” section under published or unpublished depending on the status of the post.
- fixed a bug with author month sorting in v0.43. Ordering is now oldest to newest and should display correctly.
- some other minor tweaks here and there
- compatible with Wordpress 2.3.x branch
v0.51 has been tested in the most current version of Wordpress on several different blogs (one with nearly 5,000 posts). If you have any comments or questions on the plugin, consider the comments section below the official place to give feedback on version 0.51.
The new TD 100 Words plugin was inspired by this Houghton Mifflin press release where the American Heritage Dictionaries editors listed 100 words they felt every high school graduate should be able to use.
The 100 word list is further explained on the book page:
The list is representative of the words that serious students will encounter in their coursework and will come to use as adults, whether in conversation or while reading the daily newspaper.
The TD 100 Words plugin matches the 100 words on that list against the words in every published page/post and returns the following information:
- Total words out of 100 list used
- Total uses of words across posts/pages
- List of words used (times used in parenthesis) - linked word when clicked will display post title(s) where word appeared
- Total posts/pages where words used
- Total words out of 100 not used
- List of words not used hyperlinked to dictionary.com for additional reference
The TD 100 Words plugin has been successfully tested on blogs with smaller number of posts to very large (see MakeYouGoHmm). It is compatible with Wordpress version 1.5.x to the most current version 2.2x as of this writing.
Known issues and official feedback post
Some false positives for words like ‘belie’ being counted as ‘believe.’ You are welcome to and encouraged to report any of those (or other) issues in this post, the official feedback post for the TD 100 Words plugin.
Official plugin page
The official plugin and download location can be found here: TD 100 Words official plugin page. The most current version will always appear on that page.
A quick note to mention that upgraded versions are available for Wordpress for 2.0.x and 2.0.10 branch to satisfy a security concern. The TD Word Count plugin is compatible with both versions.
Update 12:26pm PST: In the comments Sterling pointed out that the title still showed the text ‘v0.41′ and not the new version, so I fixed that and also added another code change that was forthcoming in v0.5 which dealt with authors that didn’t have any posts not showing up. I also changed the title of this post to v0.43 rather than write an all new post.
During the weekly live radio show I host last Friday 3/23/07 (show #324) fellow VTOR Author and group blogger JohnnyRS pointed out that TD Word Count v0.41 was counting attachments as unpublished posts. This made it appear as if there were a lot more drafts waiting in the wings than there actually were. I fixed this bug an am releasing v0.42 v0.43 today. Only two four lines of code have changed over 0.41 and if you don’t use attachments on your blog you won’t even notice any change. The bug doesn’t impact the published word stats, only unpublished stats.
You can download v0.42 v0.43 at the TD Word Count page. This bug is also present in v0.3, 0.4 and v0.41.
The next major version of TD Word Count will be v0.5 and include a few new features, some requested, some surprising perhaps. I might do this as a beta branch and then make v0.6 the next official major release. No official release date is available or planned at this time but I am actually using a very early version of v0.5 here. More testing required before being kicked out to others.
Wanted to take a minute and thank a few folks who I’ve noticed have blogged about and/or are using TD Word Count:
At the risk of missing mentioning many other bloggers using TD Word Count (definitely not intentional) because there have been literally hundreds of downloads to date, if you have blogged about TD Word Count plugin please feel free to let me know below when/where (trackbacks are fine) so I can read your feedback about the plugin. From the comments I’ve read out there so far the plugin has been well received. I’ve been using it myself on most our blogs and am glad to see others are finding it useful too. I look forward to see what folks have to say about v0.5 when it gets released into the wild.
Happy blogging to you!
A quick note to point out that TD Word Count is compatible with v2.12 of Wordpress announced and released yesterday. This is an important security update for Wordpress 2.1.1 users, so I would strongly urge you to read the announcement and if it is applicable, to upgrade your WP installation.
Also I am actively working on v0.5 of the TD Word Count plugin and would like (crossing fingers) to have a public beta or official release available at some point this month.
New feature: Multi-author published post and word stats by month.
I participate to a group blog and needed to compile published post/word stats each month for the group, thus the new version of TD Word Count includes posts stats by author by month.
See what month you posted the most words. If you are a single author blog there will still be some benefit as you can drill down to your word count stats by month as well as individual posts made during months.
If you have a lot of authors contributing to your blog, say over 25, with a large number of posts then this plugin isn’t for your group. It is not optimized for larger groups, but should work very well for groups from 2-15 with hundreds to thousands of posts. If larger groups would like to use a plugin like this then leave me a message below and I’ll work on a different version that is for groups over 25 people.
Technical details
This plugin uses two database queries whenever posts are edited or published.
Download
You can download v0.41 on the TD Word Count plugin page.
Update 5:45pm PST: v0.41 replaces v0.40 to fix a small bug with new authors having no published posts (thanks Lestat)
A quick note to mention that all versions of the TD Word Count plugin are compatible with Wordpress version 2.1 released and available for download today.
There are legitimately good reasons to customize your author view of your Wordpress-powered blog: to trim the information that doesn’t apply and/or would not be interesting/relevant to readers.
In WP you can do this with code that looks like this in the template:
if($user_ID == ID) {
// show content only to ID
// you can find the ID number by going to Users
}
My page viewing, when logged in, for this blog looks different than it does for readers. For example, I don’t have the contextual advertising showing, this way I won’t have any of my own accidense. I will sometimes browse without being logged in on other non-main machines just to monitor that ads are in fact showing and they are relevant, but my main machine doesn’t show me the context ads. I do have the banners and all other ads showing that aren’t on a Pay Per Click model.
For those who use tags in their posts, you might consider showing three or less of the most important tags and leave the rest so only you see them. For the example below, we’ll assume that the number of tags was stored in a $tags array:
if(count($tags) > 3 AND $user_ID == ID) {
// show more than 3 tags to ID only
}
What about search engines?
Search engines don’t like hidden/different content for them so always show the search engine what readers will see by default. Showing the engines a bunch of keywords as links will be a red flag. It looks way too much like spam, even if that’s not what was intended.
Description
With the TD Word Count v0.3 plugin bloggers can sort through and view both total published and unpublished posts by word count most, least words, title alphabetically, date (oldest to newest and newest to oldest). I’ve been using this for a couple weeks myself for our blog with the most posts and have found it useful for providing a snapshot view of word counts and also useful for searching through titles and posts on a single page. The video screencast below explains in detail how it works.
TD Word Count Video Keypoints
[0:15] Where and how to access TD Word Count stats from within the Wordpress dashboard after activating the plugin
[2:45] How to search all published posts by most words
[3:23] How to use your built-in browser find/search (CTRL + F) to search through titles
[4:28] How to sort by published blog post title: A-Z and Z-A
[4:58] How to sort by published blog post date: old to new and new to old.
[5:31] How to switch to viewing unpublished posts
[6:28] How and why date sorting differs with unpublished posts (uses ID#) vs. published posts (which uses the date the post was published).
This screencast has a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License and you are welcome to embed this on your own website/blog. The code to embed this is provided on the official TD Word Count plugin page.
Installation
1. FTP tdwordcount.php to the wp-content/plugin folder.
2. activate the TD Wordcount plugin in your Wordpress blog admin
3. add a new post or edit/update an existing archived post. This will generate your initial word count stats. It will be updated in the future any time you edit an existing post or add a new one.
4. navigate to the Dashboard -> Word stats page to view the stats
Help/Support
TD Word Count v0.3 is licensed under the GPL and is provided as is with no support implied or offered. If you have questions, comments, or discover a bug or problem with TD Word Count v0.3, please leave comments/feedback below. All first time comments left are moderated so please be patient. No spam or off-topic comments will be approved.
Download and Official TD Word Count plugin page
The official TD Word Count plugin is available for download at: http://www.tdscripts.com/wp/tdwordcount/
