Long story short, our Weblog Tools Videos has had some major spam issues recently and we have taken action to try and prevent this deluge of spam. Thanks to Otto for the heads up on that.

In this mess, we have also had a couple of content generators complain that their videos, hosted on sites such as DailyMotion and YouTube, were used on Weblog Tools Videos without their explicit consent. This got me thinking about the possible ramifications embedding videos on a blog or website. I could not find any permission or license information on the pages where the allegedly infringed videos were hosted and so I assumed that we should remove the videos, which we did.

• If the video page allows embedding, does that constitute implicit permission to post it elsewhere?
• Is there copyright and license information buried within the agreement that users electronically sign on uploading to YouTube? Do the video sites allow distinction between the various types of licensed content?
• If the original content provider is retained (such as using an YouTube embed) and a link is provided to the original video, is that enough? How does the regular user know when not to embed without permission? Should a formal request for permission be assumed in every case unless otherwise noted?

I have tried to find any references to laws, discussions or law suits that talk about the rights of the content viewer and embedder and the best I can come up with are discussions about previously infringing content which are irrelevant in this discussion. Can anyone shed any light on this?

To take this one step further, if you display embed code on your blog or website (think ShareThis), are you implicitly allowing your content (whatever the embed allows direct publish access to) to be republished elsewhere? If you do not allow sharing of your content without permission, are you just displaying certain types of social media tools that prevent wholesale copying of content? I know I personally never factored this into my thought process. Anyone else run into these issues? I wonder what the traditional media with electronic outlets are doing?

Lots of questions without a lot of good answers. If you have some insights, please leave a comment with relevant links and I will update the post for our readers.

This morning, I read a refreshing post by Justin Tadlock on his personal blog which does a wonderful job explaining the roles and capabilities system in WordPress. See, Justin is working on a fancy new plugin which will make creating new roles and assigning capabilities to those roles easy as 1-2-3. It’s a good thing to know how a system works before you tinker around with it. While I know there is a Codex article dedicated to roles and capabilities, the way Justin explained the system illuminated a number of light bulbs in my head. It all makes sense to me now and it doesn’t seem as overly complex as I originally thought. Please give the article a read for yourself and not only provide Justin with some feedback, but I’m wondering if his explanation helped anyone else?

Stats – Stats – Stats.  They can drive everything for your WordPress site.  They can help you understand how visitors move around your site; how they got there in the first place; what are the most popular posts they are visiting; what browser and OS they are using. The list can go on and on.

I have spent a lot of time over the last few months looking for just the right plug-in to track stats on my WindowsObserver.com website and I think I may have hit the mother lode with my most recent discovery.

CyStats is written by Michael Weingaertner and has been downloaded from the WordPress.org Extend directory 32,435 times over the 23 months it has been available there. The last update was last October so it would be nice to see an update however, it works just fine with the current release of WordPress (2.8.4).

According to the author’s description CyStats provides:

• Bounce rate, ignore-by-cookie, ignore-by-ip/post-id/user_agent lists
• hits, visits for day/week/month/year – human or robots
• Top referring pages
• Most read categories and tags
• Most read, most commented posts
• Most read feeds, number of feed visits today
• Internal/external search words
• Operating systems
• Daily, weekly, monthly and yearly statistics
• 404 error requests
• Browsers/clients/tools/…, w/o. version numbers
• Template tags for most read posts, user count,…
• Optional IP-anonymizing
• Multi language support (currently English, German supported).
• Optional tracking of admin area visits

Set up and installation is very easy – just install in the normal manner either via FTP upload or update within your WordPress Admin Plug-in area. Once it is installed and activated the first stop should be the Options under Settings>CyStats. Here you can configure various database settings, statistics tracking (disable userlevel tracking, admin page stats or anonymize IP’s) as well as setting filtering cookies to block IP’s, User Agents and ignoring requests by page or post ID. This page also has the Delete All function and it is highlighted in bright red – do not use this unless you want to completely remove all CyStats info from your database.

On the lower left side of your Admin panel you will see a link for CyStats and a click on that will take you to the main menu for CyStats:

The Index page is broken down into:

Hits and Visits

Pages and Comments

Referrers and Search Words

The Blog page shows recently commented posts; most active comment authors, tags and categories as well as some database statistics for your WordPress site.

The Clients page breaks down  as follows:

Browsers; Operating Systems; Browser versions and tools and scripts (including WordPress)

Robots and Tools; Unknown user agents

On the Referrer page you will find referrers today, yesterday, external referrers and search engine referrers:

The Robots and Tools page is another summary of visits broken down by search engines; email/feed readers; tools and scripts and the unknown user agents:

When you click on the Pages link you will find a summary of your most visited blog pages today; most visited overall; entry pages to your site; 404 error pages and page types (single, archive, feed, 404, home, page, month, category, search, author, day and year):

The last page is the Time page and this gives you a snapshot of your visitors per day; per hour; per weekday; per week; per month and per year. You also get hits per day; per week; per month and per year.

Bottom Line

As you can see from the screenshots this is a very thorough tool and really does give you an in-depth snapshot of your sites visitors. That in turn can help you better layout your site, establish a plan to write on popular subjects and focus your efforts on the areas of your WordPress site that really draws those visitors.  I like this plug-in above others that I have used because it breaks things down between non bot and bot visits which gives me a better idea of human eyes on my site as opposed to machines which can be misleading.

I am very interested in hearing what your favorite methods are for tracking visitors on your website.

Eximius

Eximius is a three column WordPress theme with left and right Sidebars. This free theme is widget-ready and SEO optimized. With simple yet elegant looks, Eximius is a very lightweight theme and loads quite fast in any browser. The two Sidebars can accommodate Wide Skyscraper Ads (160×600). Eximius has a textured navigation menu bar with integrated search box.

Persephone

Persephone is a WordPress theme, two-column, dark background, with a right sidebar, compatible with WordPress version 2.7 upwards, and all ready for paged and threaded comments. 3 styles to choose from – good old blue, red, green…

F2

F2 is a fast loading fluid width theme for WordPress. Customizable header, any of the two sidebars can be optionally turned off, and much more options in the settings page. Compatible with WordPress 2.8 and above.

Visiting Card

A quick mini site with links to social networking sites. The theme comes with Theme Control Panel from where you could set all the aspects of the theme. If you don’t need some of them to show, simply leave them blank and they won’t appear.

Feusional

A simple 3-column, fixed-width WordPress theme, with theme option from dashboard and Twitter integration.

Are you a theme author, submit your theme to get listed in these posts.

WordPress in itself gives you enough to make the community bigger and bigger, but then we all contribute to it bit by bit.

Here is a short poll, tell us whether you are a Rockstar user who uses WordPress  for blogging or whether you are a serious Rockstar WordPress user who develops plugins or themes that help other users.

And yes please leave your comments saying why you have the WordPress power, why it makes you a Rockstar, it would really be great to listen and learn from you.

<br /> <a href=”http://answers.polldaddy.com/poll/1932746/” mce_href=”http://answers.polldaddy.com/poll/1932746/”>Are you a WordPress Rockstar?</a><span style=”font-size:9px;” mce_style=”font-size:9px;”>(<a href=”http://www.polldaddy.com” mce_href=”http://www.polldaddy.com”>polls</a>)</span><br />

P.S: I used the word Rockstar, because WordPress releases are named after musicians, and I love both music and being a Rock lover, I enjoy both my music and helping the community.

So I was decking out my laptop with stickers the other day and realized that I really miss having a Weblog Tools Collection laptop sticker.

Weblog Tools Collection Laptop Sticker

So I got in touch with a few vendors and come upon Sticker Giant who were great to work with. Now that I have a sticker for my own laptop, I have many others left on the roll and I am itching to give them away. So if you want a Weblog Tools Collection laptop sticker for free, please fill out the form and we will send a few out for you ASAP.

Since postage is kind of expensive, if you missed this round and would still like one, we will have more of these sticker giveaways in the future and if I play my cards right, I might even have a way for people to order them online for very little money. Stay tuned for that.

If you are a tech company or blog and have stickers of your own that you would like distributed along with these, please contact me using the form in the menu above.

New Plugins

WP Paging

Unlike many other page navigation plugins, this one is based on a core page number function called paginate_links. Wordpress use this function for the page numbers in wp-admin. If it’s good enough to use in Wordpress core, it’s good enough right?

Gravatar Box

Gravatars are great. But many people don’t have them. Wouldn’t it be nice if, when a user was filling in the comments form, the page could automatically detect and show a users gravatar, if they have one? Or even better, show a sign up link if they don’t have one?

Fast and Secure Contact Form

Fast and Secure Contact Form for WordPress. The contact form lets your visitors send you a quick email message. Blocks all common spammer tactics. Spam is no longer a problem. Includes a CAPTCHA. Does not require JavaScript. Easy and Quick 3 step install.

Import CSV

Import CSV or XML content directly from an url or by paste the content. Auto detect url and email adress to make a link on it.

Software Shop

Add self-maintaining software shop to your WP powered site and monetize your blog.

Mobile Device Detect

This WordPress plugin integrates the mobile device detect function from detectmobilebrowsers.mobi to wordpress. It allows to redirect mobile visitors to a custom target URL.

Updated Plugins

Smart Archives Reloaded

Gives you an elegant and easy way to present your posts on a single page.

Front-end Editor

Enables “edit in place” functionality on your site: from post content to text widgets.

Gravajax Registration

Since the introduction of a 404 by Gravatar, I have updated the plugin to return a message to get a gravatar only if the user’s own is not returned.

Intense Debate

IntenseDebate Comments enhance and encourage conversation on your blog or website. Custom integration with your WordPress admin panel makes moderation a piece of cake. Comment threading, reply-by-email, user accounts and reputations, comment voting, along with Twitter and friendfeed integrations enrich your readers’ experience and make more of the internet aware of your blog and comments which drives traffic to you!

Wapple Architect Mobile

Wapple Architect Mobile Plugin for Wordpress is a plugin that allows you to mobilize your blog in minutes.

WP Carousel

WP Carousel is a plugin that allows you to add a carousel with a category’s posts. Is easy to install and use. Page not in English

Display Thumbnails For Related Posts in Wordpress: I have been a huge fan of related posts in blogs for some time. They really help your readers by drawing them into the conversation and increase stickiness of your blog. WordPress.com has a similar feature with related posts from various other blog on the network. Variations of the related posts plugins include our very own “Where did they go from here?” plugin and more centralized version such as the Waypath service.

The tutorial linked above explains one way to add thumbnails to your related post links in order to draw your readers attention to the links. The method is not as automated as I would like it to be and does require a few bits of code that is provided but I believe it can really help keep readers on your blog longer. I remember when small pictures were added next to AdSense ads and it raised clickthroughs to such an extent that Google had to re-examine their policy and ended up making them illegal. My suggestion is to keep the thumbnail small and relevant. Automated generation of thumbnails would be much more preferred. As part of the Weblog Tools Collection Plugin Competition 2009, George Spyros has also released his Rich Related Posts plugin that might be of interest.