tag:widget

Hana & Sarah’s blog

Here is the Yahoo widget that I created . It’s my first Yahoo! Widget and it is for WordPress Blog Stats Monitoring.

Features
Basically it shows below six information of your WordPress blog.

1. Total number of spams caught by Akismet
2. Number of spams in moderation
3. Number of comments in moderation
4. Number of posts
5. Number of comments
6. Number of categories

Optionally number of unique hits for today and yesterday only if wp-shorstat or wp-slimstat plugin is installed.

The below image is the About menu of the Widget.

Requirements

• You do have Yahoo! Widget installed , right?
• You must have a WordPress Blog.
• You need to install and enable HANA-XML-STAT plugin that I created
• You need to enable Akismet Spam Blocker plugin. In fact, you don’t have to enable it , but then you won’t be able to see the related statistics.
• Optionally, you might want to install wp-shortstat or wp-slimstat for hit counter.

History
10/22/2007 - v0.4
Some bugs with XMLDOM routines so errors occur when there is no child node exists (No values)
v0.3
DockIcon Function Added for Yahoo! Widget Version 4. Akismet, Comment in moderation, Hit counts are displayed.
v0.2
Initial Release.

Install & Setup

1. Download and double click the ‘hana-wp-stat.widget’ to open the widget. You will see the popup window to set the wordpress URL in the preferences menu.
2. Open preference menu and provide the URL of your wordpress. Please make sure that you need to set the correct wordpress URL. The prefix ‘http://’ is needed, too.
3. WordPress Userid & Password are required only if (1) you want to use the ‘Recheck comments for SPAM’ menu or (2) if you set ‘hana-xml-stat’ wp plugin option for only signed in user to access the data.
4. By using Update Interval Slider , you can set the time period that the widget will acesss the statistics data. The default is 1 min, and the maximum value is 60 mins which is an hour.

Some Notes

When there are some comments in moderation, you will be able to use ‘Recheck comments for Spam’ menu. ( Or little red ‘X’ icon ) What it really does is to check the comments with Akismet again.

It is found that there is a time that some spams fall into the comments moderation section when the Akismet plugin timeouts connecting to Akismet spam server. It usaully happens when the network is slow and busy.

So by just checking again, you can make sure that there is no spam lurking in your comments moderation box.

There are several similar products when it comes to Desktop Widgets. There are

• Apple DashBoard
• Microsoft Vista Gadget
• Google Desktop Gadget
• Yahoo Widget

Here is the article from Yahoo Widget Blog The Ever-Changing Widget Landscape with the comparison and the explanation between the different version of Widgets or similar products.

I agree with the blog in regards of Apple DashBoard and Vista Gadget that they are heavily depended on the OS. I can’t even try Dashboard and Vista Gadget cause I don’t have the OS (Mac OSX or Vista). With the current Windows XP, I have two options Google Gadget and Yahoo Widget anyway. But since Goolge Gadget is much less dynamic and intuitive, so my only option is Yahoo.

There are about 4000 widgets in yahoo widget gallery. That is just too many and I already wasted quite amount time browsing and testing one by one.

I hope that there is some featured articles or guides to introduce only few outstanding widgets everyweek or so.

I have been using Yahoo widget (http://widget.yahoo.com) for about a year now. At first, I found that many widgets are fun and eye-catching and placed them in my desktop. I liked Yahoo widgets.

But at certain point, I realized they consume too much memory that each widget took at least 4 or 5 MB of physical memory even if they weren’t doing anything important. So I decided to remove one by one. Most of them are not productive and taking up too much spaces anyway.

And there are only 3 widgets survived in my desktop as of now.

• Simple Monitor :
  Shows CPU, Memory, Network bandwidth In/Out , IP Address, and Uptime information as a graph in a single rectangle area. Very neat. But beware, since it’s a monitoring widget, it consumes more system resources than other widgets.
• WidescapeWeather:
  Shows five day forecasts, but you can minimize to view only today’s forecast.
• Slickies:
  This is the best notepad that I have used. You can set it up so each note can be hidden to the 4 sides of the screen and appear only when you click on the note. That function is very useful so you don’t have to search for your notes again!