Tech Ravings

Default WordPress widgets provides us “Recent Comments” and “Recent Posts”, while great, it takes up real-estate between the two widgets. They also do not keep our visitors informed of any updates to posts or pages that we make, so some of our updates may be lost to the reader. With any lack of activity of the two visitors may choose not to return to our sites.

The Recent Activities plug-in combines both the “Recent Comments” and “Recent Posts” widget into one widget thus saving the real-estate on our blogs. It also looks for any updates to a post or page and displays it in the list. Now not only are we saving space but also keeping the visitors informed of new information.

Visitors also re-visit an active site. Using mine, Tech Raving, as an example I may not make an active post for three weeks as work and responsibilities allow me. Doesn’t mean in not active with all the downloads and trackbacks I receive. Recent Activities accounts for this. If you have the new version of Download Counter v1.1 your downloads will be displayed. New user registration to your site is also displayed to encourage visitors to not only register but also return to your site.

You may be asking why I released this as a pre-release status? That is because I am far from done with this plug-in. It is a fully functional WordPress plug-in that you can use solely on your blog. However it is the start of a more “universal widget” (innuendo, if you know what that means you know where I am going). Such that, because you can use it right now on your WordPress blog I wanted to release it.

You’ll have to stay tuned to see the affect of full “Universal” display of your blog activity!

Get it here and check for updates Recent Activities

I have made a new feature change to the Download Counter plugin. When a file is downloaded it is recorded with the date of the download. This allows the plugin to work with a new plugin I am developing at the moment and will be released very soon. This update is only useful for the up-coming plugin, but if you also want to record the historical download information then this update is also needed.