Best of Moonlight Blog 2007

As we move into 2008 I thought it might be fun to look back quickly on the year that was with a top 20 post of the most popular posts published on Moonlight Blog this year (according to page views on Google Analytics). I hope you enjoy this trip back through the year of 2007 at Moonlight Blog.

Wordpress Plugin: Chinese PinYin Slug - 2,467 views

Survival For Standalone Blogs - 1,682 views

China Internet Censorship Goes Crazy - 1,682 views

The Secret Of Internet Censorship In China - 1,461 views

FeedBurner Blocked By China - 1,276 views

FeedBurner Is Completely Blocked In China - 1,201 views

Google Answers Censorship In China - 1,082 views

About This Blog - 1,041 views

Baidu Hijacking Google, Yahoo, Microsoft In China - 1,019 views

Google Launches Chinese Blog Search - 1,014 views

YouTube Blocked In China - 986 views

WordPress MU AdSense Plugin - 944 views

WordPress Plugin: Post2Mail, Send Post to Email - 693 views

How To Visit Google BlogSpot In China - 670 views

WordPress Plugin: Yearly Blog Stats - 625 views

Wordpress Plugin: Keyword Filter - 615 views

WordPress Plugin: MySQL Server Crash Monitor - 552 views

YouTube, Have a Merry Halloween - 540 views

WordPress Plugin: WP-PostViews JavaScript Edition - 526 views

About - 520 views 

All in all it was a fairly busy but very satisfying year of blogging here at Moonlight Blog. Thanks to the many readers who have contributed either with guest posts, comments, emails and tip offs. I'm looking forward to yet another great year in 2008.

WordPress Plugin: Yearly Blog Stats

Yearly Blog Stats is the easy way to display the total year number of blog posts, comments and other stats from anywhere within your blog. One file, easy to use.

With Yearly Blog Stats, you display only the information you want, where you want. This plugin is highly flexible, simple to use, and completely free.

Display any or all of the provided site statistics — customize your own set to provide only the statistics you want.

Features:

1. Total number of posts in this year
2. Total number of comments in this year
3. Most views post each month in this year

Installation and Usage

Unzip wp-stats.zip and copy wp-stats.php to your WordPress root directory.

Download Latest:

Click here to download the latest version of WordPress Yearly Blog Stats Plugin.

WordPress Plugin: SimpleTags Modification

WordPress SimpleTags is a WordPress plugin that will allow you to easily manage tags of your blog. However, I found some of bugs of WordPress SimpleTags, here is my modification.

1. Search terms problem:

SimpleTags use of the full text of the search, as long as the article contains the keyword matching, which can lead to large errors match, I modify it only match of the headlines.

Open file simple-tags\inc\simple-tags.admin.php, in line 1466, replace:

$search_sql = "AND ( (post_title LIKE '%{$search}%') OR (post_content LIKE '%{$search}%') )";

to:

$search_sql = "AND ( (post_title LIKE '%{$search}%') OR (post_title LIKE '%{$search}%') )";

2. Untagged only problem:

When blog have large numbers of the article, the untagged only function will return errors, I change some of original code in the SQL statement , greatly improving the efficiency of search and speed.

Open file simple-tags\inc\simple-tags.admin.php, in line 1475, replace:

$p_id_used = $wpdb->get_col("
SELECT DISTINCT term_relationships.object_id
FROM {$wpdb->term_taxonomy} term_taxonomy, {$wpdb->term_relationships} term_relationships, {$wpdb->posts} posts
WHERE term_taxonomy.taxonomy = 'post_tag'
AND term_taxonomy.term_taxonomy_id = term_relationships.term_taxonomy_id
AND term_relationships.object_id = posts.ID
AND posts.post_type = '{$type}'");
$filter_sql = 'AND ID NOT IN ("'.implode( '", "', $p_id_used ).'")';

to:

$p_id_used = "SELECT DISTINCT term_relationships.object_id
FROM {$wpdb->term_taxonomy} term_taxonomy, {$wpdb->term_relationships} term_relationships, {$wpdb->posts} posts
WHERE term_taxonomy.taxonomy = 'post_tag'
AND term_taxonomy.term_taxonomy_id = term_relationships.term_taxonomy_id
AND term_relationships.object_id = posts.ID
AND posts.post_type = '{$type}'";
$filter_sql = 'AND ID NOT IN ('.$p_id_used.')';

WordPress Plugin: Post2Mail, Send Post to Email

Some of WordPress user needed a plugin to send an e-mail to a mailing list whenever a post was published to the blog. Here is a modified version of the "Post2Mail" plugin which can email the post to a mailing list or email address.

WordPress Post2Mail plugin allows you to automatically e-mail selected people when a post is published on your blog. Also useful for alerting an administrator when a post has been published on the blog. Configuration is done in the post2mail.config.php file which has comments to get you started.

This modified plugin have the following Features:

1. Support Far East Characters (such as Chinese Characters). Use base64 to encode email title to support Chinese Characters.

2. Fix some Security bug.

Installation / Configuration Instructions:

1. Edit post2mail.config.php to add the email address or mailing list address.

2. Upload post2mail.php and post2mail.config.php to your WordPress plugin directory.

3. Activate the plugin.

Download Latest:

Click here to download the latest version of WordPress Post2Mail Plugin.

WordPress Plugin: WP-PostViews JavaScript Edition

Lester Chan develop a greate WordPress plugin - WP-PostViews, can enable user to display how many times a post/page had been viewed. It's base on PHP. But if you active WP-Cache plugin, you will found that  WP-PostViews not working. So I develop a new javascript version of WP-PostViews, that can work fine with WP-Cache or WP Super Cache plugin.

Installation / Configuration Instructions:

1. Install normal version of WP-PostViews 1.20.

2. Upload postviews.php to your WordPress plugin directory(wp-content\plugins\postviews).

3. Upload wp-counter.php to your WordPress root directory.

4. Activate the WP-PostViews plugin.

Download Latest:

Click here to download the latest version of WP-PostViews JavaScript Version plugin.

How To Turning Off WordPress Autosave

WordPress autosave is the best features which I hate in WordPress. My WordPress hosting is very slow, when I post new article, sometimes I got two saved post. The autosave features almost make me crazy. How can I turn off the autosave?

I finally patched core program post_new.php to disable autosave for a "new" post and the problem went away. Do not know if this will help you or not. My patch for v.2.3.1 follows. Newer versions might be around the same location.

Edit the file wp-admin/post_new.php WP v2.3.1 and insert "//" (without the quotes) at the beginning of this line (currently line 8):

wp_enqueue_script('autosave');

Save and upload the file post_new.php, and the WordPress autosave features is now disable.

WordPress Robots.txt For SEO

The robots.txt file is used to instruct search engine robots about what pages on your website should be crawled and consequently indexed. Most websites have files and folders that are not relevant for search engines (like images or admin files) therefore creating a robots.txt file can actually improve your website indexation.

Implementing an effective SEO robots.txt file for WordPress will help your blog to rank higher in Search Engines, receive higher paying relevant Ads, and increase your blog traffic.

Here is my robots.txt files, which can further protect WordPress from this duplicate content issue.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-
Disallow: /feed/
Disallow: /trackback/
Disallow: /comments/feed/
Disallow: /page/
Disallow: /comments/

After you created the robots.txt file just upload it to your root directory and you are done!