Tag Archives: series

Simple Series – Half-Life; Market Research

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I’m wondering at what point will the downloads on this plugin plateau.  Whatever the eventual baseline download rate, I would suspect that speaks to the amount of maximum market share that is possible for a plugin that performs these functions.1  I would think that downloads would spike when I release a new version of the plugin.  Given that I released about five updates to this plugin the first day, I would assume some of those initial downloads were duplicative.

As far as rankings go, at this time this plugin is #5 on WordPress.org’s plugin search page, #5 inside WordPress’s internal “Add New” plugins search page, and no where to be seen in the Google rankings.  Looking at Google Keywords, it appears that there’s no small amount of search traffic for the keywords “WordPress series.”  There’s some 200,000 global monthly searches.  One of the reasons I’m following this so closely is that I’ve had a few ideas for plugins that I could sell.2

Here’s the WordPress.org plugin download stats for “Simple Series with SEO!” for the first four days.

  1. 1/26/2012: 1 download
  2. 1/27/2012: 99 downloads
  3. 1/28/2012: 37 downloads
  4. 1/29/2012: 20 downloads

What will tomorrow bring?

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  1. I promise I won’t subject your RSS feed to my obsessive stats checking.  Much of the time I use this blog as a way to document/save/organize information that is probably really only interesting to me. [↩]
  2. A brother’s gotta earn, right? [↩]

My first published WordPress plugin! Simple Series!

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This may seem silly, but I’m really happy with having published my very first plugin on WordPress.org.

My Simple Series plugin lets you easily create and helps you automatically maintain a list of posts.  I started writing this plugin because all of the existing ones seemed really clunky and over-engineered.  There’s no need for extra tables in WordPress, brand new taxonomies, or special system requirements.  If you can fire up any recent version of WordPress, you should be able to use this plugin without a problem. 1

As much of a WordPress fanboy as I am, I’ve never actually shared a plugin on the WordPress.org repository.  It was simultaneously easier and more difficult than I thought it would be.  The page that discusses how you can contribute your plugin and talks about “checking out” files makes absolutely no mention of how you’re supposed to do this!

Apparently you require a program to connect to the WordPress SVN to check out the file and commit changes.  On the advice of Schmarty I’m using TortoiseSVN.  Once that was installed and a sub-directory selected, it was relatively easy to commit changes.  If you haven’t tried it before, this whole SVN thing feels like a clunky slow version of FTP.

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  1. Of course, now people are going to start e-mailing me with problems… [↩]

Must… stop… brain…

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I can’t help it.  Another idea using the last mouse funnel occurred to me.

What if you had a long tube with a series of bristles all pointing in the same direction just like the mouse funnel?  Put some peanut butter on the outside, install in a door, and walk away happy and content that you’re saving mouse lives.

Once the mouse started down that tube it wouldn’t be able to turn around or back up easily.  Given the option of unlimited freedom outdoors and chewing its way back through pokey bits, I can’t imagine it would choose plastic splinters.