My 82 year old grandmother heard that I was writing an article and her first response was “You should write it about sex. That’s all anybody talks about these days.”
I won’t be talking about sex. Instead I’m going to talk about why I include PressTrends in all of my themes and the problems that it has brought to the surface.
The bounce rate on this post just skyrocketed, didn’t it?
George Ortiz presented at WordCamp Birmingham today, and announced that PressTrends will be coming out of closed beta this week on Tuesday. The public launch will also bring the launch of a plugin for WordPress users that will offer statistics and analysis based on information gathered by all sites tracked by PressTrends. PressTrends has been in private beta since November, serving statistics to selected theme authors and shops.
Based on the brief demo Ortiz gave (see the photo below) the upcoming plugin will track a site’s posts, comments, and active plugins. Based on performance, Ortiz said, he hopes that the stats will be able to offer bloggers tips for how to improve the number of comments and success that bloggers see.
I know what you’re thinking—it isn’t possible. Could this really be a new WPCandy Podcast? Indeed it is. After a shamefully long gap since the last podcast we’re back at it, this time joined by the newest contributor to WPCandy, Daniel Immke. In this episode we discuss the Quarterly a bit (by the way, pre-order yours), WordPress 3.3 RC1, WordAds, and a couple of fun stories that popped up in the last week or so.
Jump straight into the podcast audio here:
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Link-wise, this week we discussed:
Then we have picks. This week Brian chose the Ambrosite Next/Previous Post Link Plus plugin, which is entirely a mouthful to say. Daniel’s pick was the Headway Themes redesign that went up recently, and my pick (though I’ve yet to play with it) is the Social plugin from Crowd Favorite and MailChimp.
Subscribe to the show on iTunes, or directly to the RSS feed. As always you can send any emails you would like to have included on the show to podcast@wpcandy.com. Download links are after the jump.
George Ortiz, a member of the Storefront Themes team, has been working on a new project since WordCamp San Francisco called PressTrends. In short, PressTrends is a new service for tracking how and where your WordPress themes are being used, ideally to improve your themes in the future. It is currently in closed beta, but you can request access via the email signup on the site.
Despite the closed beta status, Ortiz was nice enough to give me a tour of the service last week and walk me through the sort of statistics PressTrends can currently collect.
Once tracked by PressTrends, a WordPress theme will report back a number of statistics about the site that it’s running on: number of posts, number of comments, and number of plugins used. PressTrends also tracks the total number of sites running the tracked theme, and charts the results over a monthly timeline. Developers can see specifically which sites are currently running their theme. It also gathers the version number of themes that are running, and presents the percentages to the developer in a nifty graph.
For a quick video tour of PressTrends, and more about the creation of the new service, see the embed just after the jump.
