Blog Updates
Posted by Laird Farquharson on 5/04/08 • Categorized as Business
It’s Sunday, and I’m doing laundry, sitting around on a lovely day, and making updates to this blog. I’m also waiting for my cat to come home (he wandered off last night, and he hasn’t come home yet. Yes, I’m very worried).
I’ve added a few very nice plugins to this blog.
- WordPress Related Posts: Generate a related posts list via tags
- WP Google Analytics: Use Google Analytics to track site statistics
I’m fond of the related posts links, because related links are just generally a good thing. When people are landing on a single post it’s helpful to show other posts within the blog that are similar or related (not to mention the SEO goodness! The more content on the page that’s related the more the search engines learn about the page’s content and the persona of the page and the site in general). In fact, you should see the automatically generated related links at the bottom of this post (and the whole history of posts too).
I’m impressed with the Google Analytics plugin for a few nice features. Rather than manually add the google code to pages or templates, add it once to the plugin and you can choose a series of options:
- Do not log anything in the admin area… or do. If you have a multi-user blog, this might be helpful
- Log 404 errors with the referrer. This is very helpful for site owners to track and find broken links (a page with a link to a broken page, will be the 404 error page’s referrer, so you can easily find the source of your broken link)
- Log outgoing links automatically. This is not easy to do manually. It requires a bit of code added to each and every outbound link. Sure, editors can do this manually, but that’s prone to lots of errors. However, I have found a bug in this feature, so the intent is wonderful, but (for me) it’s broken.
- Do not log User roles when logged in. When a logged in user is on a page, the plugin will omit the google code entirely. This ensures that your logged in users (normally this is you) doesn’t count in your stats.
Thanks, Aaron Campbell, very helpful.
