My Three WordPress.com Wishes: Part 3 Delayed

About 36 hours ago, WordPress.com flipped the switch to incorporate features from the new 3.1 standalone version. This has apparently caused a few unexpected problems and I figure it’s better to wait until the dust settles before editing and publishing the third part of my three WordPress.com wishes.

Hope it won’t be too long.

My Three WordPress.com Wishes: Second Wish

More Stats!

Dear @wordpressdotcom More comprehensive statistics #2ndof3wishes #11millionusers Blogger Live Stats Vs WP Stats http://bit.ly/9NJxKq—
JenniferT (@wysiwygjt) July 07, 2010

So the WordPress.com Dashboard Stats page got “sexified”, but still lacks comprehensive statistics like visitor country, time of visit, length of visit, page entry/exit, etc., etc., etc. As far as I know, this information is already being collected on your blog via both Google Analytics and Quantcast. Other 3rd party stats apps such as “whos.amung.us“, “Clicky“, “SiteMeter” and Google Webmaster Tools can fill in some of these blanks, but these utilities can’t do the entire job because of the javascript limitation in place here. Timethief has some excellent information about visitor tracking, and why external stats programs are never quite as accurate as inhouse tracking, on her blog, onecoolsitebloggingtips.com

If not as a part of the basic package, can we say “Paid Upgrade”? There certainly would be a market for it. Check out these forum discussions on Google Analytics and Woopra.

(Should anyone reading this be using the WordPress Stats plugin on their external, self-hosted WordPress install, if you see other kinds of information that we here on WordPress.com don’t, please leave a comment and let the rest of us know.)

One other stat I’d be interested in seeing in all our Dashboards are full subscriber statistics. As it stands now, subscriber stats only reflect the people who signed up to receive your posts by email. If someone subscribed in the WordPress.com Admin Bar and set their Subscription Reader preference to “never”, i.e. read their subscriptions only in the Reader on WordPress.com, they aren’t counted in your subscriber stats.

As an aside, for the truly stats obsessed who use the Chrome web browser, there’s the WordPress Stats extension which will allow you to check your WordPress blog’s stats without having to log in to your site. For users of Firefox, there’s MMD WordPress.com extension. (NAYY) Of course, if you’re checking your blog’s stats continuously, you also may want to seek help for your condition. Just saying…

So that’s my second wish. What about you? Do you have a wish to make your WordPress.com experience rock? Put it in the comments or post your own “My 3 WordPress.com Wishes” and send a backtrack to any of my posts.

Third wish coming soon; stay tuned! Better yet, sign up for my blog’s RSS feed or read by email. You can grab both in my sidebar.

Better shared!

My Three WordPress.com Wishes: First Wish

Anyone who reads this blog on a regular basis knows that I WordPress.com. The wranglers, gardeners, engineers and poets do an amazing job of keeping our little home on the web the envy of the blogging neighborhood.

While surfing around the web a few months ago, I kept bumping into articles about apps or utilities that made me think how great it would be if WordPress.com supported them. So, here is the first of my three wishes for making my WordPress.com world rock a little harder.

More Mobile!

Dear @wordpressdotcom a mobile app for the rest of us who don't/won't have a smartphone. #1stof3wishes #11millionusers cc @snaptu @fring—
JenniferT (@wysiwygjt) July 02, 2010

Being resigned to the ranks of the un-cool using WordPress.com’s mobile site (m.wordpress.com), I found its bare bones functionality lacking a little something. Actually, lacking closer to everything.

With the estimated number of WordPress.com bloggers having reached 13 million+ (also according to one well-placed source) and WordPress.com celebrating the one millionth mobile user mark, one would hope there’d be some incentive to add an app to the growing arsenal of existing WordPress.com mobile apps for the rest of us without smartphones. Regular mobile phones still outnumber smartphones, especially outside the US. Sadly, however, nothing expected in the foreseeable future. (I know that it’s possible to post by email, but that’s just not the same thing.)

If there’s no incentive for WordPress.com to directly develop an app, then maybe Snaptu or Fring could pick up the challenge. With thirteen million blogs on WordPress.com alone, minus the combined WordPress.com and WordPress.org’s one million users using WordPress’ mobile apps, that’s a lot of potential users.

(The above tweet was brought to you by serendipity, as WordPress.com has just recently started using Twitter’s Blackberry Pie tweet embed. Thank you WordPress.com! #awesome #FTW)

There are, of course, two more posts coming with my additional wishes. Meantime, if you have your own wish that would make using WordPress.com more awesome for you, feel free to leave it in the comments. Better yet, why not start your own “Three Wishes” for WordPress.com. Who knows? Maybe between us, we’ll find that genie in a bottle.

Better shared!

I’m Cleaning My Oven… While I Sleep!

via I’m cleaning my oven… while I sleep! (If only!)

Rob Cottingham’s “Noise to Signal” and released by him under a Creative Commons Non-Commercial/Attribution license.

Better shared!

Every PicApp Picture Tells A Story, Or Not

A major change in the way the PicApp service works has left WordPress.com users wondering how much longer the PicApp images they’ve already embedded in their blogs over the past year will be available for viewing. WordPress.com’s Raanan Bar Cohen announced the collaboration with PicApp almost a year ago in near glowing terms.

We all love adding great images to our blog posts, and today we’ve enabled a new WordPress.com Shortcode that adds millions of available premium images to the mix, all for free.

The announcement goes on to explain that,

The related-images strip you see embedded at the bottom of each photo links to pages on PicApp.com that help support the photographers and agencies involved with these images.

So when did it all go sour? Apparently PicApp recently changed their modus operandi from that relatively innocuous ”related-images strip” to a full blown, javascript lightbox overlay that includes advertising. This isn’t to say that there wasn’t advertising before; however, as mentioned above, in order to see it you had to click on the related image and be whisked away to the PicApp website. Now the advertising comes to your blog.