phoxis Computer Science, Others

Using WordPress.com stats API

gimp_logoLong ago I posted about the WordPress.com stats API. WordPress.com Stats API. WordPress.com stores your blog’s raw visit stats which is available via your API key and the blog URL. Basically these stats are used to show the stats you see in your dashboard.

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The older wordpress.com dashboard did not have much visualisations of the stats, but the new dashboard has introduced some more ways to see how your blog is doing. When I posted WordPress.com Stats API, there was absolutely no trace or documentation about the wordpress.com API. It seemed that even the guys in wordpress.com was not well aware about if such an API existed :D . (Check the post to know why).

At the previous post I just provided some guides on how to fetch the data. Recently I planned to write a quick implementation to fetch the stats from wordpress.com and therefore I am going to share the script. This is a quick and dirty implementation to demonstrate the stuff. I have also made a few processing on the incoming data and made a few plots. Most of which might not (will not) make much sense (especially the box plots), but it’s just for the baseline. Let’s proceed with the code. Continue reading “Using WordPress.com stats API” →

phoxis Writings

2013 in review

Like last year here are some stats of this blog for this year from wordpress.com. Worse this year, especially post count is 16, not enough compared to last year post count 24. Lesser visits this year, but some new relatively new posts have caught attention. Hoping to keep the post count at least 2 posts per month on an average on 2014.

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2013 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 75,000 times in 2013. If it were an exhibit at the Louvre Museum, it would take about 3 days for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

phoxis GNU+Linux+FOSS, Tutorials

Add vertical scrollbar in wordpress.com sourcecode blocks

Sometimes I post sourcecode accompanying my posts which are long and makes the length of the post unnecessarily long. The wordpress.com sourcecode shortcode has an option collapse which you can make “true” to collapse the sourcecode box when the page loads. If you post a long code, when the code box is expanded it will be inconvenient to scroll through the page and read. Also sometimes you might not want to collapse the codebox when the page loads. For this I have a solution. Add vertical bars to the codebox using the div tags.
In this way the length of the code portion in the page remains fixed and to read the code one requires just to scroll in the code box. Checkout what I am talking about in some of the code posts, for example in the posts here and here. Here is how it is done. Continue reading “Add vertical scrollbar in wordpress.com sourcecode blocks” →

phoxis Writings

phoxis.org 2012 in review

Here goes some stats of this blog for this year from wordpress.com. Not bad, but not satisfactory, the end year posting frequency was terrible.

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

19,000 people fit into the new Barclays Center to see Jay-Z perform. This blog was viewed about 86,000 times in 2012. If it were a concert at the Barclays Center, it would take about 5 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

phoxis GNU+Linux+FOSS, Tutorials

WordPress.com Stats API

gimp_logoWordPress.com has a very nice stat plugin showing the overall post views data and also post by post, but it would be always great if there was more. A lot of people talk about introducing Google Analytics. A lot of people save the data offline by copying the summary tables into files to save the site data. I had an idea to process the data of my site a bit differently and find trends in the data. I thought except copy-pasting the site summary data, there should be a cleaner manner to store the data. First I made a brief Google search, then made a wordpress.com forums thread. Then i had a short chat with Mark in wordpress.com freenode IRC and was redirected to wp.com email support. The first result came from email support telling that there is no data export feature. But another email followed to correct the previous one which told about the wordpress.com stats API with which you can get your wordpress.com site’s stats data in CSV or XML format.
Continue reading “WordPress.com Stats API” →

phoxis GNU+Linux+FOSS, Tutorials

WordPress.com IRC Channel

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Support is one of the best features in wordpress.com . The official documentation, the email support and the mainly volunteer driven forums make a very strong and fast support system. Except these three there is another support system in wordpress.com which almost no one is aware of. The freenode IRC channel of wordpress.com .

IRC is a text-based chat system that allows millions of people around the world to communicate in real time.

The IRC chat will enables you to communicate with other people in the chat room and get direct support, discuss about topics and a lot more.
Read more to know how to configure wp.com IRC

phoxis GNU+Linux+FOSS, Reviews

Do Really ALL of us want to Reblog ?

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After a huge wave of excellent features and themes from wordpress.com in the last months, wordpress.com included a new feature what they call “Reblogging”. At the fist look i thought it was something like the facebookish “Like” button on the top for bookmarking, or subscribing it in readomattic, or like in StumbleUpon. But it read like this :

If you decide that you want to share the post with your own readers, you can click the “Reblog this post” link and you’ll be taken to the new QuickPress tab on the WordPress.com home page. This will auto-fill a snippet of the post text, a link back to the original post, and a link to the blog. If the post includes any images we’ll also automatically add a thumbnail image to the reblog post. Finally you can add your own comments to the reblog post then select which blog you’d like to post it to (if you have more than one).

I thought okay, wordpress.com is trying to get “social” (were we unsocial or anti-social before?), but i discovered the feature was like this:
Continue reading my view about the wp.com Reblog feature

phoxis GNU+Linux+FOSS, Reviews

WordPress.com Top 10 Features

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WordPress.com is a free web-blogging service which uses WordPress CMS software as their blogging platform. Here are the free blog feature list : http://en.wordpress.com/features/

Before starting a blog in wordpress.com , I tried some CMS softwares offline. I used Joomla, Drupal, Vox, Plone, etc. WordPress CMS matched my exact needs. Self hosting was a tedious task with the work of creating content as well as an extra burden of administration. I decided to go with the free blogging services. I registered with blogger.com and spent some time testing it. Although it is feature rich with allowing editing theme XML, CSS, allowing JavaScript, Flash embeds, but somehow it was not a match for me. At last I finally tried wordpress.com . After starting it felt a bit bad as there was no manual theme customization options which became a habit that time, no free CSS editing, no JavaScript, and had limitations. As time passed, I was getting into wordpress.com the more I discovered the features and adjusted myself, and started to post more content. At last I am now fixed in wordperess.com, and mapped a domain with their domain upgrade feature.

Continue reading to get the Top Ten

phoxis GNU+Linux+FOSS, Tutorials

Re-Enable WordPress.com random blog surfing

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Wordpress.com blogs you have Tag and subscribed Blog surfing features with which you can surf your subscribed blogs, and get the update information from the blogs. You can also have the list of Blog of The Day in here http://botd.wordpress.com/ . There seems to be no random blog surfing, and blog hopping and just hovering over different blogs in wordpress.com at this time. Earlier WordPress.com had a Next Blog link on the admin bar on the top, when you are logged in into your wordpress.com account, (http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2006/02/08/blogs-where-to-next/). But it was removed. But although the link was taken out, the feature is still there. This post will describe how to re-enable the Next Blog feature, and let you visit blogs randomly .

Continue Reading to enable the Next Blog feature