I changed themes mid December, and according to googlebot’s stats, pages have been taking twice as long to load since then. This got me thinking. What was it I added that caused this? Surely I didn’t make the pages twice as heavy?
More What’s slowing down my blog?

With the recent success of this blog, I’ve been thinking about making a donation to some of my favorite WordPress plugins. Being a plugin developer myself, I know how even a small donation can be a real pat on the back.

Open Source software isn’t about money, but many developers spend countless hours perfecting their software and answering support emails. I’d like to thank some of them, and I thought I’d let you help me decide which ones. Please read on for my ‘nominations’, and post a comment to let me know which ones you think I should support.
More Which WordPress plugins should I donate to?

I just released Footer Stuff through wordpress.org. Even though it’s a very simple (and lightweight) plugin, it’s not very easy to describe what it does. It offers you a way to add code to your blog’s footer an header sections, without having to edit your theme’s PHP files. Located under WordPress’ design tab it offers easy way of maintaining things like Google Analytics code, without being limited to just that one analytics system.

It’s here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/footer-stuff.

Get Recent Comments is probably the WordPress plugin that I’ve used for the longest time. If I remember correctly, it’s been displaying recent comments over on Choking on Popcorn since 2004. Back then it took template editing to put those on your sidebar, and even then they didn’t look very nice. But even the current ‘recent comments’ widget falls far short of what ‘get Recent Comments’ can do.
More “Get Recent Comments” makes your comments look so much better

I’m testing a little plugin I whipped up in 15 minutes on this blog. It allows you to copy paste code snippets into a text area (located on an options page under ‘Design’). That code is then inserted into you blog’s footer without the need to edit any template files.

I can’t believe there isn’t a plugin already that does this. Doesn’t everyone have lots of little code snippets that need to be added between the body tags of the blog? Doesn’t everyone hate having to copy those from one theme to the next when switching themes? Am I missing something?

Would any of you consider using this? Should I try developing this into something worth releasing?

Igor A. Melekhine recently sent me a modified version of my Youtuber plugin that adds a ‘high quality’ checkbox to the options page. When checked, Youtuber will attempt to play all videos in the superior MP4 format. Not only will this improve video quality, it’s also the only way to get stereo sound. I’ve incorporated Igor’s changes into a new version, 1.4. Available from your local wordpress.org now.

Thanks Igor, Novastar sounds so much better in high quality.

I just checked the download stats on the WP-Cumulus page at wordpress.org, and saw that the plugin has been downloaded over ten thousand times. Unfortunately, I have no idea how many people downloaded it from this blog before I moved it to the WordPress server, but the total number of users is probably even higher.

10,000 downloads is insignificant when compared to the hundreds of thousands downloads registered for some other plugins, but i’m pretty excited that so many people have taken the time to give WP-Cumulus a try.

This is a first for me. Even though I’ve always been a firm believer in the open source licensing model, I’ve never actually released anything as free software. Up until now. As of ten minutes ago, WP-Cumulus is open source. From now on the plugin will be hosted on WordPress.org, and I will no longer offer it for download here on my own website. But that’s just the start of it.

Because it’s now open source, the source files for the Flash movie are also available for download for you to tinker with. This means you’ll be able to change the font, embed your language’s character set and change anything else you feel beneficial for your blog. If you improve on the plugin’s functionality, please let me know so I can consider adding your changes.

Have fun!