Category Archives: Display tools

WordPress Recent Comment plugins: Review

We’ve been using WP-RecentComments plugin for a long time (despite it not have been updated for 2+ years), but since WP has upgrade to 4.2.4, it’s been de-activating itself every five minutes – literately – so Reader’s comment not appear on the home page. This has led to a drop in commenting.

I looked around the WordPress ‘Show recent comments’ plugin world and amazingly there wasn’t much around. There’s a brief review of what’s available below.

WP Tab Widget was my first choice as it used AJAX to load the comment (keeping page load times as short as possible), but I found that it gave a “Plugin could not be activated because it triggered a fatal error”, which I’d never see in WordPress before. I’ve put a report in about it to see if it can be resolved.

As a stand-in I installed the ‘Decent Comments‘ plugin which has worked very efficiently, loading pages quickly each time. Only thing is that it’s styling isn’t great. This might be alterable with attention.

Quick review of available show recent comments plugins

WP Tab Widget
https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-tab-widget/screenshots/
Looks perfect
AJAX loading of comments
Crashes on Activations

Decent Comments
Last Updated: 3 months ago
Don’t think it’s AJAX

Better WordPress Recent Comments
Not updated for Two years

Popular Widget
Perhaps not AJAX
Not updated for 10 month
Display looks old fashioned

Facebook badge in ad spot trial

We have the luxury of many page views, so are trying a little experiment.

We previously used to have the FB Like badge on the page, but removed it after we found it could have quite an impact on the page being delivered quickly. Its performance seems to have increased over time.

Why this badge?
I feel the major advantage of this badge over others is that it shows the faces of your FB friends that like the page, so giving reassurance/encouragement to also connect.

Its placement, where there are usually adverts, could also encourage people to pay more attention to that space, rather then just assuming that it will be an advert there.

On a very low rotation we’re placing the Facebook Badge (generated here) in our top MPU slot.

We’ll monitor for any increase in FB Like/signup rates.

Graphing data made easier with dataWrapper

We’ve been wanting to display our numeric data in a more attractive way for a long time.

Over the last couple of months we’ve been trying out DataWrapper and today we got a chance to use it live on a story about the amount of money that the IW council spends on media in a year.

We’re pleased with the results. Not only is there a little interactivity with the graph that is created – mousing over the items, highlights them – but getting the data into the system is as simple as copying and pasting the columns out of a spreadsheet.