Note: This post refers to code and a project from many years ago . The content was edited in March of 2025 to remove dead links, improve clarity, or fix formatting, but no other edits were made. Enjoy this time capsule into the past.

Update: this plugin was originally called Ackee WP but has been renamed to Soapberry to comply with the WordPress.org trademark policy for plugins. The plugin can now be found on WordPress.org under the slug Soapberry.

As part of my desire to own my data, I haven’t used Google Analytics for the past few years. In that time I’ve been curious about my site statistics but knew when I resumed collecting data I wanted to do so in a way that respected the privacy of my visitors.

This year I started a search for self-hosted tracking solutions and came across a lightweight node application, Ackee. After looking at a few other options I decided on Ackee for its care in anonymizing user data. Through hashing the user’s IP, a unique domain ID, and a salt which changes daily, site visits can be tracked without tracking the individual visitors.

For my needs, I want to know how many visits my sites are getting, where visitors are coming from, and how long they stay on the site. However, I do not have a need or desire to track individual visitors.

Using Ackee with WordPress

After setting up an Ackee instance and adding the tracking script to a few static sites I wanted to bring the functionality to my WordPress sites. At first, I just edited the theme’s footer.php file which worked well enough as a quick way to insert the script. Next, I hooked into wp_footer() so it would be easier to exclude logged in visits from the analytics.

While both of these methods work they do require a bit of WordPress know-how and do not carry over when switching themes. Wanting a better solution, I got to work writing Soapberry a WordPress plugin that adds the Ackee tracking script and data attributes to the site’s footer based on settings saved on a WP Admin page.

Keeping things simple at first, this first version of the plugin only has the ability to exclude all logged-in visitors and does not take into account the personal data options provided by Ackee. In the future, you may be able to exclude visits by role and enable opt-in tracking for personal information.

Exploring Ackee Alternatives

If after looking at Ackee you don’t think its right for you that’s okay. Ackee won’t be right for everyone. The good news is there are other options when looking to move away from Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, or other third-party tools.

Chris Wiegman wrote a post on anonymizing and tracking visits at the server level to avoid the JavaScript requirement of many trackers. The folks over at Awesome Open Source also list several other Analytics tools that can be explored. If you find a tool you like let me know what you are using in the comments.

Note: This post refers to code and a project from many years ago . The content was edited in March of 2025 to remove dead links, improve clarity, or fix formatting, but no other edits were made. Enjoy this time capsule into the past.

It’s one of the (not so) well kept secrets in WordPress that a team is busy redesigning the admin interface.  In fact, if you use WordPress.com you have likely noticed a change in the admin layout some time ago. For those of you using a self-hosted WordPress site the change most likely won’t happen till at least 3.7.

However, for the early adopters and developers you can preview the new layout by using the MP6 Plugin.  I personally (and from the forums, many others) felt that the new sidebar was too dark. It also currently looks like MP6 plugin won’t give users the option to switch between layouts. For this reason I’ve created MP6-light which basically works by adding a stylesheet that makes the admin a bit lighter. Check out the project page or get the plugin from the WordPress repository.

NOTE: This plugin requires the MP6 plugin to be installed.

P.S: I’m also looking for people to get involved with the project on github.

Note: This post refers to code and a project from many years ago . The content was edited in March of 2025 to remove dead links, improve clarity, or fix formatting, but no other edits were made. Enjoy this time capsule into the past.

I just wrote a simple plugin to blackout your site on January 18th for the SOPA Blackout day. Check it out on the project page.

Note: This post refers to code and a project from many years ago . The content was edited in March of 2025 to remove dead links, improve clarity, or fix formatting, but no other edits were made. Enjoy this time capsule into the past.

I just put out a quick fix for MobileESP for WordPress to hopefully FINALLY fix the two click cookie issue. Version 1.3.1 can be found in the other versions folder over on the WordPress Plugin page. If you don’t see 1.3.1 listed just grab the “Development Version.”

Please test this version and let me know if any issues arise if all goes well I’ll make this the stable version.

CHANGES IN THIS VERSION:
– Upgraded the MobileESP library to latest stable version
– Hopefully fixed full site redirect issue.

Note: This post refers to code and a project from many years ago . The content was edited in March of 2025 to remove dead links, improve clarity, or fix formatting, but no other edits were made. Enjoy this time capsule into the past.

[UPDATE] this plugin has been updated to 1.2.1 to add support for removing the cookie. See the comments of this post for more info.

I just wanted to write a quick post to let you know that MobileESP for WordPress version 1.2 has been released. This release contains the latest version of the MobileESP library as well as a bugfix for the full site url link bug which was requiring clicking on the link twice.  Get the latest version from the WordPress.org Plugin repo or update the plugin from your dashboard.

Note: This post refers to code and a project from many years ago . The content was edited in March of 2025 to remove dead links, improve clarity, or fix formatting, but no other edits were made. Enjoy this time capsule into the past.

In case you missed it I decided to do a small April Fools prank this year. I came across cornify.com and liked the way it worked. I thought it would be funny to have the unicorns pop up if the user was inactive on the site for longer than a few seconds. So I got to hacking the script and came up with a simple plugin Cornify for WordPress. This is a simple WordPress plugin for the self hosted WordPress blog that will show unicorns to the inactive user. There isn’t a control panel but if you read the readme you do have a few options for modifying the script.

Without further ado here is a screenshot:

Get the plugin today!

Note: This post refers to code and a project from many years ago . The content was edited in March of 2025 to remove dead links, improve clarity, or fix formatting, but no other edits were made. Enjoy this time capsule into the past.

I just released version 1.1 of MobileESP for WordPress this should fix any problems people were having with iPhone and Android devices not forwarding correctly. I also updated the MobileESP class and minified the source which made it half the size.

As always, if you have any problems please report them in the forums tagging them with at least ‘mobileesp-for-wordpress’

Note: This post refers to code and a project from many years ago . The content was edited in March of 2025 to remove dead links, improve clarity, or fix formatting, but no other edits were made. Enjoy this time capsule into the past.

As you may know I’ve been working with WPBook for the past 2 years. In that time I’ve watched the project grown dramatically the plugin now has over 73,000 downloads. However, the project has only had a handful of people who have gotten involved with the project.  Therefore, I wanted to write a quick blog post and give you a few ways to get involved.

Are you a programmer?
Great, we keep track of bugs and feature request over at our bug tracking system http://bugs.wpbook.net. If you get a moment fix a bug or add a feature. You may also just wish to use this system to report bugs.

Are you a graphic designer?
Cool, you may be able to help us cook up some neat graphics for WPBook, update our logo, or just give us feedback that could otherwise improve the project.

Are you a writer?
Neat-o, we can use your help to spruce up the docs making sure they are easy to understand, accurate, clever and free of typos .

Want more ways to get involved?
Okay there are plenty of  other ways to get involved. Head on over to the support forms and help a fellow user. I’ve also just set up a donate page where you can make a donation to help pay for website cost. We are also pledging to give 50% of any donations made to Charity Water. With a goal of $500.

If  you have any questions or comments please let me know. Thanks!

Note: This post refers to code and a project from many years ago . The content was edited in March of 2025 to remove dead links, improve clarity, or fix formatting, but no other edits were made. Enjoy this time capsule into the past.

UPDATE 12/11/10: As John noted in the comments below the most recent beta can be found at the WPBook download page at WordPress. Get the latest copy of 2.0.10 here: https://wordpress.org/plugins/wpbook/download/

Today I am uploading a new beta version of WPBook. This version needs some testing before being forked into core so if you download it and have any problems let me know.

You can download the version here

New in this Features version:

Facebook Avatars – if you have the gravtar setting on and the visiter leaves a comment from Facebook (or leaves their Facebook profile url in the url field) you’ll see their Facebook Profile picture instead of their default gravtar. This is true for both your parent blog (outside of Facebook) and the app view (inside of Facebook)

New Admin Layout – The WP-Dashboard admin page has been completely redesigned and organized into three categories: required, Streaming and Facebook App View. The “advanced settings” have been removed and integrated into the appropriate place in the settings. Tooltips have also been removed. Hopefully this layout is easier to use. Thanks to Ozh’s YOURLS: WordPress to Twitter for the inspiration and some of the code that powers the admin interface and the Tango Project for the expand/collapse icons.

Bug Fixes:

The default of “post to facebook” is now set to true

The link in set_permissons=true now links to WPbook.net instead of the old instructions folder in your install.

Other Notes:

Folder Cleanup, the client and cron file includes have been moved to there own “include” folder

The Facebook  Tab view has been moved to it’s own folder inside the wpbook/theme folder

Please let me know any feedback you may have on this build.

Note: This post is from many years ago . The content was edited in March of 2025 to remove dead links, improve clarity, or fix formatting, but no other edits were made. Enjoy this time capsule into the past.

I’ve been working with the very talented team of WPBook for the past two years. I have contributed a few ideas and bug fixes. Today marks a very big for us. We just hit 50,000 downloads. That’s a lot of downloads! I would like to thank everyone who has used this plugin over the years and contributed back their thoughts and ideas, struggles and love for it. I can’t wait to see what the next 50k downloads bring.