Our hosting company has notified us that they will need to take down many servers this evening (March 5, 2008) around 12:00 a.m. EST in order to perform “mandatory emergency power maintenance” for a period that should last about a half hour. They also advise that we power down our servers prior to this to safely preserve our data, so we may be shutting down our server for up to an hour. This post is to serve as a quick heads up for anyone who needs their daily Pligg fix who might frequent the forum late at night like I do. I will update this post after the server comes back online to confirm that everything went smoothly.

EDIT:

Turns out that our hosting company doesn’t need to take us off-line. We will not be turning off this evening as anticipated earlier.

A few days ago I updated OpenX, the script that we use on Pligg.com to manage advertisements. Formerly (last week) it was known as OpenAds, and a less than a year ago it was known as phpAdsNew. Today after checking the stats to make sure that everything was tracking correctly I decided to crunch some quick numbers to figure out how much the featured sites are paying per click on average. Based on the last three days of statistics, it turns out that monthly advertisers are paying about 0.095 cents per click, and half year advertisers are paying around 0.069 cents per click. I bring up these statistics because we’d love to earn some more advertisers. Our rates currently are $2.20/day for 6 month advertisers and $3/day for 1 month advertisers. Each advertiser receives an account to check their stats online along with weekly emails that include daily details for each days statistics.

Learn more about becoming a Featured Pligg Site here.

IRC Software

Colloquy (Mac and iPhone) / Trillian (Windows) / Konversation (Linux)
Communication is key when you work with a team spread across the globe. None of the Pligg developers have had a chance to meet in person, so it’s even more important that we have a tool that allows you to communicate with the group whenever we need to. Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is “used by millions of people, and thousands of organizations, to communicate, share, play and work with each other on IRC networks around the world. Serving the Internet community for over a decade, mIRC has evolved into a powerful, reliable and fun piece of technology” (mirc.com). We have used IRC since we started Pligg two years ago to communicate with the developers and Pligg users, and operate a room (#pligg) on freenode.net’s server. You can join the room without any software by logging in to our java web-based room.

FTP Software

Filezilla (Stand Alone) and Fireftp (Firefox Plugin)
Everyone needs a way to publish files to their web server, and my way is always the free way. Filezilla is available for Windows, Linux and Macintosh platforms and is a stand alone client. Fireftp is a Mozilla Firefox plugin that operates within Firefox.

Browser Testing
Browsershots.org (Web) and MultipleIE (Windows)
Most designers without a lot of test computers have used Browsershots at one point or another to double check that their work is coming out the same on most browsers. “Browsershots makes screenshots of your web design in different browsers. It is a free open-source online service created by Johann C. Rocholl. When you submit your web address, it will be added to the job queue. A number of distributed computers will open your website in their browser. Then they will make screenshots and upload them to the central server.”

One problem that most web designers have is testing on multiple browsers. Not only do you have to design for the latest browser versions for Internet Explorer, but you have to accommodate the several previous versions of IE that are less friendly to deal with. Unfortunately the world isn’t perfect and a lot of systems are still running IE6 and below, to help test for these older versions of Internet Explorer I use MultipleIE. This software lets me run Internet Explorer 7 all the way back to Internet Explorer 3.0 all on the same operating system. For some reason I never heard of this software until recently, so I’m a bit hesitant to suggest it even though it has been an essential tool that I use almost daily.

Miscellaneous
HelpDesk Software Hesk (Web)
We use this software over at the Pligg Pro Helpdesk, where we support our shop products. The software gives you an easy way for users to submit support tickets and category administrators will receive email alerts whenever there’s a reply. It’s well organized, easy to install and simple to maintain. Most importantly, it helps us streamline our support system to let us fix problems faster.

Winmerge
The ultimate tool for those who customize Pligg in any way. Winmerge compares files and directories and helps organize the data so that you can merge two documents together in sections or as a whole. One recent example of how I use Winmerge is when I needed to update my Pligg 9.8.5 templates to the latest format for Pligg 9.9. What would normally take me a couple days took me only a few hours.

Notepad ++
Not everyone uses Dreamweaver for designing sites. If you are fluent enough that you can write without the assistance of a program like Dreamweaver, you might want to try out Notepad ++. It organizes data well and is a great replacement for the standard windows notepad. I find it to be a cleaner interface with fewer distractions.

I’ve seen a lot of other sites listing their top posts of the year, and it inspired me to share some interesting details about visitors to Pligg.com. We aren’t able to give an accurate number for traffic before mid June when we switched to using analytics on the entire site, so here are some stats collected since July 1, 2007 (5 months ago).

• The average visitor has stayed for 4 minutes and 41 seconds.
• The top 3 languages are English, Chinese, and German.
• The top 5 countires are the United States, China, United Kingdom, Canada and India.
• Top top browsers are Firefox (61.80%) and Internet Explorer (28.83%). Opera and Safari fall way behind at third and forth place at 3.96% and 3.78%.
• 84.69% of visitors use a Windows machine, 9.77% are Macintosh and 5.18% are Linux. A sad 0.02% are iPhones and below that are Nintendo Wii and Playstation 3 consoles.

Happy 2008 everyone! It’s a new year, and what better way to kick it off by releasing the long awaited Pigg Beta 9.9.0
I’ll leave the technical stuff to the change log but I’m sure you will agree this is the best version of Pligg yet. Besides a slew of core improvements and a multitude of bug fixes, the first thing you will notice is a slight change to the installation process. We are rolling out a language fetching feature to the installation process. This will allow you to select a language, then the installer will connect to the Pligg servers to download the most up to date language pack.

Another new addition is Template Management. This will allow you to download and install templates instantly. You can also repackage templates for distribution much easier.

Some other great features included in this version are the addition of the Akismet anti-spam, and new Captcha module for registrations which allows for different types of Captcha methods to be used. Agree-to-Terms allows you to set up a user agreement upon registration.

We would like to thank everyone that made 2007 a great year for Pligg and we promise that 2008 will be the best year yet!

We are looking for 20 or so dedicated Pliggers to help us go through some intensive testing on Pligg 9.9.0 beginning this Wednesday December 26 and continuing through Monday December 31st.

You must be familiar with Pligg’s features, and be available to provide detailed bug reports. Including the operating environment and any steps taken to recreate the said bug.

If you are interested please respond to this thread.
You will be contacted with further instructions if you are selected.

Thanks

Pligg Development Team