Archive for December, 2006

FireFox plugins

Posted in Linux SysAdmin, WordPress on December 15th, 2006 by Johan Huysmans – Be the first to comment

In my last post I listed my WordPress plugins. Now I will give you an overview of the firefox plugins I’m currently using.

Nagios Checker will show you the status of your nagios instance(s). It will flash and/or make some noice when a service of host changes it’s state.
AdBlock Plus will block all the annoying banners. I noticed it really improved the loading speed of some pages.
SwitchProxy makes it able to easily switch the proxy configuration without going to the preferences screen.

counterize and other wordpress plugins

Posted in WordPress on December 10th, 2006 by Johan Huysmans – Be the first to comment

Some time ago Anders Holte Nielsen announced that he would stop developping counterize. He suggested to use Firestats, which is an other wordpress plugin, launched out of Counterize.

I installed and tested Firestats. It has some nice features but also some downsides, it’s missing graphs. It’s all text, text, text with a nice ajax layout. I’m not happy enough to completely move to Firestats, at the moment I’m still using both Counterize and Firestats.

A couple of weeks after the previous mentioned post Anders Holte posted already 2 patches submitted by some Counterize-lovers. This showed that counterize wasn’t ready to die. And indeed Counterize II was born. It moved from Denmark to Germany in the hands of Steffen Forkmann.
I updated my old Counterize version to version 2.0.3 and noticed that there were already some added features.
Counterize shows some graphs but imho it shows the wrong information. I don’t want to know how many people visited my site on the 5th of every month. I want to see how many visitors have visisted yesterday, the day before,… This way I can see if the number of visitors is increasing or decreasing. The graph showing only this months hits is a good thing, it would even be better if it was showing the last 30 days.

Keep up the good work, Steffen!

Meanwhile I activated Akismet (an anti-spam plugin). It will check every posted comment with the central database. You need to register to wordpress.com to receive an API-key, but it is worth the effort.
I also installed DB-Manager which allows you to manage the wordpress database from inside the controll panel. You can backup the database, drop some tables, optimize all tables or execute any query and many more.