You’ve no doubt seen the little Extreme Tracking icons at the bottom of websites that track traffic to the site. I’d like to share another tracking service you may not be familiar with as most people run it invisibly (it doesn’t require you to run a logo banner on your site). It’s called Statcounter. It’s a free service though you can subscribe to the service to get added features. You just put a strip of code into your site and it tracks your visitors for you, letting you know such helpful things as how many there are and where they are coming from. What I really like about Statcounter is the Control Panel you log into, you can have several projects (separately tracked websites or pages) from the same account and see them all at a glance or click on each one for more detailed information.

Here’s a screenshot looking at Statcounter’s one week visitor traffic graph. It is showing page loads (or hits as often called) in green and unique visitors (actual number of people visiting your site) in blue.

Handle high traffic!

The most recent version of WP-Cache works pretty well. WordPress is pretty quick software and caches access to the MySQL database as it is. But with WP-Cache, pages that are normally created by the server on the fly are written to basically HTML files which can be brought up by future accesses to the same page. This reduces processor and database access load on the server. The main reason you may want to use this or even just activate it as needed is if you get linked by a very high-traffic site.

One problem I have with WP-Cache is that it does not like to work with the Theme Switcher plugin. There is one fix that kind of fixes it. Depending on the browser the person is using it just doesn’t always update when they switch the theme, until at least the next time they reopen their browser software. You need to edit the “wp-cache-phase1.php” file. Find this line:

if (preg_match("/^wordpress|^comment_author_email_/", $key)) {

and replace it with this line:

if (preg_match("/^wordpress|^wptheme|^comment_author_email_/", $key)) {

I run WP-Cache on all my WordPress installs, for my comic that has the Theme Switcher plugin I have it running but disabled, so I could just enable it in the event I got a surge of traffic for some reason.

Also it is good to turn the cache off while working on the template so that the changes are reflected and you are not looking at cached pages.

WordPress 2.2 | Release Notes | Download

The long awaited new release of WordPress is finally here, I think like a month late but the way they’ve been churning out updates we’ll let it slide. The big new feature in this version is Widgets. They’ve basically integrated the existing Widget Plugin into the software itself. They had talked about having Tags too but I guess they didn’t work out, I’ve read they can be pretty tricky, there is a plugin but I personally was waiting for an official release with WordPress. Basically they allow you to tag posts with words for grouping them or finding them in the blogosphere, rather than having to make such a junkyard of categories.

I meant to Widget-ready the ComicPress theme but it was all my time just getting it finished up and running smoothly as it was. It will allow people to add and remove stuff to the sidebar easily from the WordPress control panel. There’s just a bit of editing to do to the sidebar.php and functions.php file. If you are anxious you can read how to convert the theme here. Although if you are that capable I don’t know there is really a need to use Widgets in the first place.

I see them mainly as a way for people not too familiar with theme editing to customize their sidebar a bit. I can make the existing elements like the calendar, the previous 5 comics, and such into Widgets, then people can easily move them around or remove ones they don’t want. Probably be available in a ComicPress 2.1 update as there are some other little changes and tweaks I’d like to make to the theme, but I’ll provide info on updating your current theme for Widgets before then.

I’ve been using the Theme Switcher plugin for WordPress on my own comic for a while. What it does is let’s anyone choose which theme they want from your theme’s folder. When I redid my site with the new name, I kept the old theme on there for people who still wanted to keep it the old way. One theme is hard enough work to design and keep up, but for those wanting to provide the best in viewing options. I’m personally planning on making another clean and simple theme to choose from for slower or mobile connections.

IF YOU ARE UPGRADING COMICPRESS READ THIS:

I’ve recently found a new use for the Theme Switcher though. I’m making the switch on my site from ComicPress 1.6 CE to 2.0 BE*. Rather than making the theme switcher available to readers, you can use it for yourself to test out a new theme and edit it live while your readers are still happily viewing the default theme. After installing the theme switcher. You just use a URL to change what theme you want to view on your own computer (instead of making a menu available to your viewers to theme switch). You will want to call one of the themes Test or something, change the name in the “style.css” file and it will need to be installed into a different folder on the server, perhaps “Test”. Then to set the new one active on your computer just type the following URL in your browser:

http://yoursite.com/?wptheme=Test

If there are spaces in the theme name, just replace them with a “+”. To see this in action, you can go here to see my site with a theme called “On the Rocks”:

http://wallyandosborne.com/?wptheme=On+the+Rocks

or here to see it with a theme called “Wally & Osborne”:

http://wallyandosborne.com/?wptheme=Wally+&+Osborne

The theme uses a cookie to remember what theme a particular user has selected. When you disable the plugin, it will just go back to the one you have selected. When the Test Site looks good, you can rename it back to ComicPress and copy it to over your “comicpress” theme folder. Then you can still have your Test theme for making further changes and testing stuff out. The new WordPress 2.2 is actually suppose to have an option to test out plugins as well, before applying them to your live site.

* I had originally built the CE version for myself because I felt the comic and blog formed one daily chunk of content together for the readers. But more recently I was no longer able to make that daily schedule, and I do want to get back to it, but I also think it would be nice to have news items that didn’t leave the front page. Basically, the new BE version came out so slick I want to use it now too even though I originally just created it for those asking for separate blog posting ability. Everybody wins.

With the launch of the new site, I’m releasing two new versions of the ComicPress Theme. Two Editions actually, the Blogging Edition and the Classic Edition. The former line of ComicPress themes, version 1.0 and 1.5 are now the Classic Edition ( featuring one post per page and only comic posts with accompanying text). The Blogging Edition is the one many of you have been waiting for. It allows you to have separate news/blog posts under the comic, and post them separate from comics.

ComicPress 1.6 CE (Classic Edition) Features

• One post per page
• Comics and news are posted together
• New archive file that is compatible with WordPress 2.1
• This is the update for 1.5, if you want to upgrade, just copy the new archive file from the download, that’s basically the only change. A version 2.0 CE is in the works.

ComicPress 2.0 BE (Blogging Edition) Features

• Can post comic or news/blog posts separately
• Recent news/blog runs under the comic on the front page
• Takes advantage of WordPress’ built-in archive features
• Still comes with the complete archive list but this time as an integrated template
• Easy to navigate comic or news/blog posts, work seamlessly in the archives
• Comic thumbnails available in the archive
• Comics built into the RSS feed
• More freedom for naming files, can mix .gif .png and .jpg
• Looks nice and is usable out of the box, no customization needed
• Informative documentation!

Head over to the about page to read more, you can get the themes at the new download page. There are also demo’s available to see them in action. Head over to The Check Family to see ComicPress 2.0 BE being used at an actual comic site with only a few images added and a couple colors changed in the stylesheet.

ComicPress sported the ComicPress Theme itself as it’s own website for far too long, and the ComicPressing blog was off in another location, lonely and unloved. So here we go, relaunching the site to serve the ComicPress community even better.

The background image is made up of 100 screenshots of comic Websites using modified versions of the ComicPress theme. I’m sorry I couldn’t include more, there are a lot of great comic sites out there using the theme. Click the image to the left to see all 100 screenshots, see how many you can recognize.

Featured Site: The Check Family
ComicPress Version: 2.0 BE
Modifications: Light

The Check Family website grabs the new Blogging Edition of ComicPress and it’s 2.0 release fresh off the press. It shows how nice and custom a site can look by adding just three images and changing a few colors in the style sheet.

*Information based on time of article. As always, sites are prone to upgrades and redesigns.

Featured Site: Butterfly
ComicPress Version: 1.6 CE
Modifications: Light

Butterfly features a really attractive color palette and seamlessly blends the header area into the headerbar link section with the use of a split header image.

Nice job Dean.

*Information based on time of article. As always, sites are prone to upgrades and redesigns.

Featured Site: Dorkboy Comics
ComicPress Version: 1.5
Modifications: Heavy

Dorkboy Comics takes publishing a comic with WordPress a step further, Damian has customize the ComicPress theme to publish seven separate comic series from the same site. The site features the latest comic (from whatever series has the most current) and allows you to browse through the archives by next/previous date or by next/previous in that category (series).

Next and previous tags within a category is a function built into WordPress and you can tap in to as well with a little research. Damian has also customized links to the archive page so that you can see an archive list for each of the separate series.

Nice work Damian.

*Information based on time of article. As always, sites are prone to upgrades and redesigns.

This blog has been pretty quiet as I’ve been busy working on ComicPress 2.0 BE. The “Blogging Edition”, a version many people have wanted that runs the comics at the top, but then a separate news feed underneath, all handled within the same WordPress installation. There will be a classic upgrade as well as some other variations of the theme available too.

For now though, you can go test out a beta of this new version.