A few days ago, I wrote a guest post on Pro Blog Design about creating a Stats page for your WordPress blog. One day later, Kyle, who liked the article, wrote a post here on WP Hacks to let you know about my guest post.  One of WP Hacks readers, Wesley, enjoyed the post and decided to create a WordPress plugin to enhance the functionality of my initial hacks.

The plugin, entitled “Blog Stats” makes available a number of statistics about your blog, including number of posts, comments, trackbacks, users and categories, PageRank, Alexa rank, Technorati rank and Feedburner RSS count.  To ensure you always have the most up to date values, the plugin automatically update statistics on a daily basis.

How to Install and use the Blog Stats WordPress Plugin

First, you have to download the plugin on Wesley’s website or on the WordPress.org page.

Once you have it, unzip it on your hard drive and upload the plugin file to the wp-content/plugins directory of your WordPress blog.

Login to your WordPress dashboard, go to the Plugins page and activate Blog Stats.

You now have a bunch of new shortcodes that you can use in pages and posts. If you don’t know what a shortcode is or want more info about it, I wrote some shortcodes-related posts on WP Recipes.

Ready to use Template

Feel lazy? After you installed the plugin, just create a new page and paste the following code in it. It will output all stats available from the Blog Stats plugin.

user_count: [user_count]
post_count: [post_count]
page_count: [page_count]
comment_count: [comment_count]
trackback_count: [trackback_count]
avg_comments_per_post: [avg_comments_per_post]
category_count: [category_count]
tag_count: [tag_count]
link_count: [link_count]
pagerank: [pagerank]
technorati_authority: [technorati_authority]
technorati_rank: [technorati_rank]
alexa_rank: [alexa_rank]
feedburner_subscribers: [feedburner_subscribers]
google_backlinks: [google_backlinks]
yahoo_backlinks: [yahoo_backlinks]
delicious_bookmarks: [delicious_bookmarks]

That’s all. I must say that I like this plugin a lot and Wesley really did a nice job!

Over the past few years a number of WordPress plugins have been created to generate and display related posts for single pages of your blog.   The original Related Posts plugin is still my favorite because it uses the post titles to determine which posts are related, but this plugin requires you to log in to CPanel and make some adjustments there (instructions on how to do this in the linked post above).

Another very comparable related post plugin is Related Posts 2.3, which was created after WordPress 2.3 added tags to the core software.   In addition to matching up related posts by your tags, it also displays related posts in your feed (the first one I mentioned doesn’t do this on its own).  This is of course only useful if you tag your posts responsibly, so it may not be a viable option for most people who treat tags as (meta) keywords.

If neither of these plugins fit your needs, there is a new plugin available which displays related posts by category.  It does require WordPress 2.3 or higher to use.

According to the author of this new plugin:

The WordPress-Plugin Related Posts by Category lists similar posts within any article. As a search string the plugin does not use the title of the article nor weighs the content. In fact the category, which was assigned to the post, serves as the source of accordance. The reason for that: Posts from an equivalent category have most of the time identical topics and can therefore be seen as absolute relevant. Is an article assigned to more than one category, all of those categories will be used for the database query. Obviously this leads to more results.

This plugin requires the same responsibility as the tag one, though people are generally more disciplined with their categories than they are with tagging posts (because tags double as meta tags usually), hopefully making the resulting posts more relevant with this plugin.

Here is this weeks collection of WordPress-related posts:

• WordPress Developer’s Toolbox - Smashing Magazine is at it again, this time providing a useful toolbox for WordPress developers.   We were fortunate enough to have about 5 of our posts featured here.
• WordPress for iPhone Downloaded 100,000+ Times - If you think about how many iPhones are in circulation after only a couple years in existence, this is truly an amazing statistic and a great sign for WordPress.
• Feed Pauser WordPress Plugin - Keith of Techie-Buzz (also Weblog Tools Collection) has released an awesome new WordPress plugin that pauses a post from being made available through RSS.  Click over to get a more detailed description.
• Different Ways to Display Content in WordPress - Devito Design does a great job of sharing a bunch of different ways to display your blogs content in WordPress.

Chances are you’ve probably noticed a number of Feedburner feed count chicklets scattered all over the blogosphere proudly displaying blog feed counts.   I’m sure many people look at this as a way to inflate their blogging ego, but I’ve always looked at this as a way to show visitors at a quick glance that your blog is liked.  Recently the popular Aweber newsletter service released a similar widget to display the number of newsletter subscribers you have, and now it looks like the chicklet has gone mainstream.

With this same idea in mind, it looks like Planet Ozh has released the Liz Strauss comment counter WordPress plugin.    This WordPress plugin was designed to display your blogs comment count proudly.    I think this plugin is a great way to show that your blog has a lot of conversations.

Ozh lists the following features:

• Performance: the plugin generates a static image every time a comment is left (or an admin moderates one). The benefit is that, when showing the badge, nothing dynamic is generated on the fly by the webserver.
• Failover: if for some reason your server was not able to generate a static image (write permissions or whatever) the plugin falls back to generating the badge on the fly, so you always have something to show.
• Minimal overhead: state of the art code that loads only when needed, and the plugin adds a grand total of zero extra database query.
• Compatibility: the admin interface either runs as a widget (with no extra “Settings” page created) or as a traditional plugin.
• Flexibility: just like your Feedburner badge, except there’s more options!
• Neat interface: one click color presets, killer Farbtastic color picker, and cute FamFamFam icons
• Ready for translation: polyglots, a .pot file is included. If you happen to translate the plugin, be sure to send me your work so I can include it in the archive! (Please send your .mo and .po files to ozh at planetozh dot com)
• Fun: well yes, it’s just fun to show how many comments you have

So basically it is widget ready and you can pick a color to match your blog.   You can download the plugin here.   Enjoy!