Here’s a quote:

For every feature that we could add to WordPress, there is a plugin for it. Wouldn’t it be interesting to look at the usage of these and guage where should we go with it.

They also state that there are 4.96 average plugins per blog. The most a user has installed is 1290; 526 of those are active.

The post goes on to list the top 10 plugins…sans links. But I have taken the time to make your journey to them a little easier by providing them in my list below. Also, no information was provided as to the basis for how this list was calculated.

Top 10 plugins
1. Akismet
2. All in One SEO Pack
3. Google XML Sitemaps
4. NextGEN Gallery
5. WordPress.com Stats
6. WP-DB-Backup
7. WP-Cache
8. WP Automatic Upgrade
9. WP-Polls
10. CformsII

I installed 2.2 on my local server and verified that my version of K2 was broken after upgrading. Luckily I found a solution. Darrell Schulte is a progressive WordPress blogger who is currently running version 2.3 alpha and uses K2. It appears that as he was using beta versions of 2.2 when he came across this issue and developed the Disable WordPress Widgets Plugin.

I downloaded and installed it and can verify that it worked with the release version of 2.2 and allowed my K2 theme to work gracefully again. I thought I’d help get the word out for all the other Sidebar Module users out there.

Bored on a Saturday night and laughing about my bank telling me about my Google check bouncing, I decided to blog about it and go to bed. I awake the next day get my coffee and make my way to the computer. I run a Firefox extension called Adsense Notifier which syncs up to my adsense account and displays impressions, click-thru rate and earnings in my status bar. When looking at it this morning I realized that I had already served about four times the number of impressions I usually serve in a day. I immediately had a feeling that a high traffic site must have linked to me. So I went to my home page and sure enough I was down. I immediately went into live chat with my great hosting company Bluehost. The admin on duty was taking a look and suggested I grab several logs from my server to try and debug the issue as well. He pointed me to a directory were there was a folder titled “cpu_exceeded_logs” and another one called “mysql_slow_queries”. There were only a few logs on some scattered days, and the logs averaged under 100k, but there was one generated on this day that was 1.32Mb…oh oh.

Going through the log it basically listed get requests with execution times. Most entries were 2-3 hundreths of a second…but then I came across a plugin which after executing was followed by a 5 seconds of cpu time for the sql query to run. I use WordPress to power my site and was able to get to my admin screen, and de-activate the plugin. I had also previously been familiar with a plugin called WP-Cache to increase performance in WordPress by caching pages and limiting database queries which I thought would be nice to need some day. Well today was that day. So I installed it, and watched as it started caching my site. Shortly after that my site was back up. Now it was time to figure out where all the traffic was coming from.

A quick view of my traffic showed that Digg was a huge referrer with a title that described a post I made the night before. I have to admit I had a few butterflies knowing that someone must have submitted it and it was gaining popularity. It had around 250 diggs. I didn’t know Notyavgkat who was the submitter and was curious as to how he found my post. So I started to read the comments and refreshed the page every few minutes. 270 diggs…290 diggs. I then message a few friends telling them about it. Wow…congrats…good job…the responses were coming in.

Apparently my site was down for quite a bit so there were a few comments that took a deserving shot at me.

• MrBlack08 wrote “the check you wrote for hosting must have bounced too. 33 diggs and its down.”
• erkshirefarms wrote “Looks like your server bounced too…”
• Matdevdug wrote “Yeah, good to see you went with the expensive hosting option. . . . .”

Then there were some funny comments about Google

• lenin wrote “Google checks is still in Beta mode. Anything in beta mode is prone to some errors.”
• flaq564 wrote “Looks like Google needs a payday loan.”
• and my favorite russvirante wrote “Oops, we spent all our money on doubleclick”

And finally… thetaoofbill wrote “Why do I get the feeling this story was made up to try to get that next adsense check bigger?”

I then went over to Google reader and saw the post appear in my Digg feed. But shortly after I saw the original submitter leave a comment stating “it appears this got buried after just 345 diggs…..wtf…is google behind this ?”. I wasn’t too familiar with the how’s and why’s of a post getting buried but I decided to do a little research. Digg offers this vague explanation:

Submissions can also be removed by users with the “Bury Story” feature within Digg. Once a story receives enough “buries,” it is automatically removed from the Digg Upcoming or Popular sections. The number of reports required to bury is based on a sliding scale that takes several factors into consideration (such as number of Diggs, reports, time of day, topic submitted to, etc.). Buried stories can still be found the profiles of users who have Dugg the story; you can also find them by doing a search.

It appears that there is a bury brigade in existence which isn’t surprising since I’ve read several stories about a small group that seems to have control of what makes the front page. I did however start using Duggtrends which offers a page dedicated to buried stories which makes for interesting reading to see which stories are being “censored”.

Spotplex is a site that was created with the goal of a true democratic system which so many people feel is a huge flaw in Digg’s system. TechCrunch and several other sites have provided their views. I became a member and have enjoyed using their site. It was interesting to see how my site’s rank rose on their system. Especially for a story with Google as a tag.

WordPress gets a bad rap on Digg when sites using it make it to the front page so I was happy to see a story titled “WordPress Performance: Why My Site Is So Much Faster Than Yours“. It’s a great post from Elliott Back, whom I’ve mentioned before as the author of a Lifestream plugin for WordPress, that discusses tweaks you can made to your server setup, php, mysql, and apache settings cache to improve performance using caching. It was nice to see all the haters commenting on how this WordPress site was surely going down now that the post made the front page. But it looks like it never did.

I also frequent the beautifully designed site by Nick La and have used his Glossy Blue WordPress theme. He too hit the Digg front page a few days ago with the release of his iTheme WordPress theme. He felt the pain as well and posted a good story on the aftermath with resources.

Lastly, in an ironic twist of fate I actually did pretty well with Adsense on the day I got Dugg, actually earning just enough to cover the returned check fee from my bank. Go figure.

• I was having IE6 compatability issues where the sidebar was wonky and didn’t appear properly
• didn’t like being at the mercy of the modder to update based on newer K2 releases
• I started having some issues with the Sidebar Modules embedded in the latest K2 and once again didn’t want to be at the mercy of K2 for SBM upgrades
• I was bored

My search for Cleaker took a while. My requirements for a new theme were:

• 3 Column with content on the left followed by 2 sidebars on the right
• Flexibility to change the overall theme width as well as the columns
• Support for Widgets (hence Sidebar Modules)
• Navigation buttons in header based on Pages
• Ability to have a custom header image
• Looked good

This was a pretty time consuming process but in the end it was worth it. Cleaker met all of my requirements and then some. The first step was to prepare by porting over all of my existing theme customizations necessary to Cleaker. I’m pretty good about keeping a text file that identifies every customization I make to my theme along with details and the actual code. These items include content from third party services like Google Analytics, code necessary for plugins, scripts for widgets etc. I highly recommend you do this as it can be a nightmare trying to remember where all these pieces are without them being documented. So edited the templates necessary as well as created all the sidebar modules necessary.

After finishing that process I began to concentrate on remaining issues. Currently I’m having layout problems I haven’t gotten around to with my Slickr plugin which I use for my photos page as well as with my Lifestream plugin for my Lifestream page. I’ve been too lazy to fix them as I struggle nightly whether to work on content or design and content usually wins. Not a huge deal and not the fault of the theme.

Next up was customizing the theme a bit for my liking. As I began to dig through the style.css file I was very happy to see that it was lined with helpful commenting. The main thing I wanted to do was modify the column the overall width of the theme as well as the columns. For anyone else interested it is easily done by editing the style values below:

#wrapper – changed width to 1000px
#header – changed width to 1000px
#content – changed width to 550px
#sidbarRight – changed width to 170px
#sidebarLeft – changed width to 150px
#footer – changed width to 971px
ul#Nav – changed to 1000px

There was still one more step necessary for these column changes to work and that was to modify the “contentbg2.gif” & “header.gif” images. Since I was increasing the content column and extending the overall width of the theme, I needed to move the seperator and add to the right side of contentbg2.gif.

Cleaker contentbg2.gif modified

I also had to increase the width of my header.gif image from 900 to 1000 pixels

I made some other changes too such as incorporating the blockquote style which I liked more from K2 and changed the font weight to bold for the headlines. I will probably play with the color scheme and make some other changes as well in the future.

I am very happy with this theme and urge others that are looking for a great looking, and easily editable theme, to give it a try.

My modified version of Cleaker 2.1 Widgetized is available here

I had considered doing this a while back, and wanted to use Photobucket but couldn’t find plugin support for them or any other site. Today I decided it was time to look again. I started my search and very quickly came upon a story Mashable over at Mashable for a WordPress plugin released from a file hosting service called Divshare. I hadn’t heard of them but since it was exactly what I was looking for I decided to give it a try.

As an added bonus Divshare doesn’t just host images they support MP3s, videos, and pretty much any file type. They also offer an embedded flash player for MP3 files. So I quickly downloaded the plugin so I could get started. Installation was a breese that only required the standard file transfer followed by a step to acquire a key from their site to enter in the plugins options. That’s it.

My next step was to write a new post to see this plugin in action. So I decided to start writing this post as a way of testing it. My first concern was that the plugin had replaced the standard WordPress uploader but they offer a link that reverts back if you need to use it. It also played nicely with my Flickr Post Bar as well. So it was time to start filling up their hard drives.

I decided to start by uploading an MP3 file as I was curious to see how the embedded player functioned as well. So I browsed my local drive for something I could share without getting a letter from the RIAA and found a nice 9mb file of a cool mix called Whistlers Delight done by DJ Riko which I got from his site. I enter a description for the track and click upload. There’s a nice progress bar showing the speed and completion percentage in real-time that I’m watching as I type this.

After the upload completes I click on over to the “My Files” tab where I’m given two options of inserting the song. The first is to embed a player to allow playback within the post. The second is to simply create a text link to the file. Below I have embedded the player for you to see. There is a disclaimer provided next to this option which states to Turn off Visual Rich Editor”. Not a problem as I have to do this often based on other conflicts I have with the visual editor reformatting php within posts as well.

Here is the player:

Now I’ll use the plugin to upload the images in this post. The first is that upload progress bar I mentioned above, and the second is to show you what the options look like when you click over to the “my files” tab. You can see the options listed on the image to the left. You have 3 sizes you can insert directly into the post as well as a text link. You can also see the options for the MP3 File I mentioned above. Once the images is inserted into the page the default link is to the full size image on the Divshare server which you can change the target to a new window if you want. It would be nice to offer a link to the full size image without having to navigate away from my site which is what I can do with the Flickr plugin but hey, I don’t mind helping promote them for their service. They do however offer you the ability to co-brand by uploading your own image to be shown on their pages.

One small concern I have is that your files list can grow pretty big and there currently isn’t a method to filter the images returned. Not too big of a problem since after you upload a file you can immediately be taken to its insertion options but nonetheless if you reach back for old images to place in the post you may be digging for a bit. I’m sure future versions will offer improved functionality since this is a 1.0 release on the heels of a beta test period. So far so good and I will be using their service to see how it performs.

I had already started pondering how we use so many sites on the web that stored information helping define who we are prior to writing “10 Web Widgets to Share Interests on Your Site“. That post goes into the concept of sharing information to provide insight to others and ourselves, but just adding web widgets and badges from sites isn’t a very elegant way to present the information and doesn’t offer much flexibility. I was already starting to plan the creation of a page that would provide this content in a clean fashion using RSS feeds.

The way I discovered the Lifestream concept was by clicking on the link at the top of Bharath Kumar’s site. A page titled Lifestream intrigued me as my mind made a connection with functionality behind the name. Unfortunately, beyond having a title, the page was blank. Well I’m a frequent visitor to his site since I use his 3 column K2 mod as the theme for my site. I then happened to land on this page linking his plugins and saw one titled “Lifestream Manager”. All wide eyed with excitement I quickly clicked on the link. Bah, another dead end. At that point it didn’t matter. I was a man on a mission and all I needed was a search engine and keywords to begin my quest.

After spending way too much time going off on a search result linkfest, I was able to find what appears to be the origin of Lifestreams based on this Yale project page. the implementation of the concept I was seeking though appears to have been the brainchild of Jeremy Keith. He explains his thoughts behind it in a post as well as providing the PHP script he used to create his Lifestream. Nevertheless, I was in search of a plugin for WordPress so I made my way to the Chris J Davis site. Proving how small the web makes the world, Chris was inspired to write a WordPress plugin after visiting Jeremy’s site as well as reading a post from Michael Heilemann. I’m thankful for Chris to have made the plugin available, but it’s by no means plug and play. You need to make special edits depending on which version of PHP you are using, you may need to run some feeds through a third party (like Feedburner) and the included CSS in the page template may not play nice with your theme. But still I decided to read the comments and hack away and with the help of a modified version of the code by Gunnar Hafdal and some of my own tweaks I was able to get mine up and running. I have also since seen another plugin created based on Chris’ by Elliot Back but haven’t given it a whirl yet.

Now that it finally works, all I can think of are ways to improve it, hoping it evolves and watch it proliferate across the web. After reading much of the comments from people talking about the concept you get a sense that people are very excited about the prospects of aggregating all of their info in one place for both personal activity monitoring and a central location for friends to check in. With all the different sites we use for specific purposes this makes so much sense.

The most common feature request I’ve seen is to add the ability to archive the feed content. This is particularly important for feeds that expire over time such as the last.fm recent tracks feed. The original concept was based mainly on the display of timestamped data. Adding the flexibility to organize content using categories or tags would be nice as well. Adding a legend definition in the header would be a great addition too.

With all the buzz I see surrounding Lifestreams, I think they are going to start spreading like fire. I plan to follow it’s progress as well as becoming an evangelist for them. Perhaps someone can start to design an icon standard which seems to help in the adoption much like what is being proposed for OPML and Share This.

So go out there, create a Lifestream, and share it with the world!

Directory of People’s Lifestreams

• Jeremy Keith – adactio.com
• Jeff Croft – jeffcroft.com
• Emily Chang – emilychang.com [Story]
• Paul Friedman – twochains.com [Story]
• lai hiu yeung – nicesoda.com [Story]
• neverendingbooks.org [Story]
• Dennis Larsen – orgday.org
• Elliot Back – elliotback.com
• Chris Simmons – cjsimmons.net
• Christopher Ware – exploding-boy.com
• Nate Ritter – perfectspace.com
• Gilberto Creque – 716ink.com
• Michael Heilemann – binarybonsai.com
• Kristin Pishdadi – wiphey.com
• Chris Messina -factoryjoe.com
• shamanistic.org
• somefoolwitha.com
• artifacting.com
• jarkolicious.com
• Olivier D.

Development Efforts for Lifestreams

• PHP Script – by Jeremy Keith
• WordPress Plugin – by Chris J Davis
• Lifestream – WordPress Plugin – by Elliot Back (based on Chris’)
• Feedgrab – Expression Engine Plugin – by Andrew Weaver
• Life-Line by Olivier D.

Popular Data Sources for Lifestreams
(keep in mind that any RSS feed can be used so that opens up quite a few interesting additions)

• Del.icio.us
• Flickr
• Last.fm
• Digg
• Twitter
• CoComment
• Upcoming.org
• Self Blog

Lifestream Stories on the Web

• Watching the Lifestream by Jeremy Keith
• My Data Stream by Emily Chang
• Lifestreams could help create new personalised discovery engines by Sam Sethi
• Using Yahoo Pipes to Create a Lifestream by Jon Rowett & Newsgoat.com [see them here]
• Mashup using Pageflakes to Create a Lifestream by Me
• Be your own big brother by Mike Gunderloy
• Wired article based on the Yale project by Steve G.Steinberg
• Lifelogging, An Inevitability by Kevin Kelly
• Your Syndicated Chronological Life by Steve Poland
• Spying on Myself & 2007: The Implicit Web by Fred Wilson

Related Projects

• Planet Venus (mentioned by others as an alternative)
• Timeline, available WordPress Plugin, and RSS2Timeline Tool
• Dandelife (site drawn from Lifestream inspiration)
• Microformats (hCalendar)
• MyLifeBits (project at Microsoft Research)
• APML (Attention Profile Markup Language)
• ggalaxy

Once I decided to go with K2 the hunt for information on it began and it took me a little while to track much of it down so I thought I’d put that information here to help others.

Get rid of whitespace at top of page

1. Log into Admin
2. Click on Presentation
3. Click on Theme Editor
4. Click on the Stylesheet File
5. Scroll down a little to the #page { section
6. Change the line padding: 20px 0 10px; To padding: 0px 0 10px;
7. Click the Update File button
8. You’re done!

A Directory of Styles and Mods can be found here

The official K2 user forum is at here

Customizing K2 is a great guide written by Paul Stamatiou that discusses many ways to customize the theme

3 Column Mods

• 3columnK2 by Bharath Kumar
• TripleK2 & TechnoBlue by Paul Stamatiou
• 3K2 & 3some by Hakan Aydin
• 3K2-Redux-Klein & Klee by Headsetoptions.com
• Anaconda by Angsuman Chakraborty, Taragana & Simple Thoughts

Integrating Flickr Falbum plugin
Guide and custom file to correct display issues with K2

Integrating Lightbox JS
Guide to integrate correctly with K2 by Kristin Pishdadi

Spanish Theme
Blue K2 Theme (also available in English)