Friday 27 February 2015

What Do You Want To See In The Next Version Of Strictly AutoTags

What Do You Want To See In The Next Version Of Strictly AutoTags

By Strictly-Software

Hello, this post is to ask my users of  the paid for version of my plugin, Strictly AutoTags what features they would like to see in the next version.

What would make you spend another £40 to get a new version of the code?

Here are some ideas I am thinking about but I welcome comments. You are the buyers so you know what would make it better or which bugs need fixing better than me.

My Thoughts On Options

One option is to add the title of the article into any links converted from plain text into clickable links - good for SEO.

Also an "Auto Categorisation" feature. So not only Auto Tagging but Auto Categorisation.

This would be done through boxes that you could add to the admin form one by one.

One to hold a number of words, the other a number/count of words that needed to be matched, the other a category.

So the logic would be that if the number of words specified in the box, e.g 5 words related to terrorism, al-Qaeda, ISIL, ISIS, Jihad John, Islamic State, then the category "Terrorism" is added to the post

A "limit" to the number of tags you can have. Once this limit is reached no new tags are added OR you could specify that the auto clean function is run so tags with less than 2 posts using them are removed and then tagging can continue.

A similar option for when for when the tagging stops working for no apparent reason. This may just be me as no-one has complained about it. However it does happen on my sites with 25,000+ tags. Usually after an update of WordPress or Jetpack plugin code.

Personally a re-save of my admin settings or a clean out of old tags seems to fix this for me.

So a CRON job feature to run regularly and check for recent non tagged posts and then these articles are re-tagged.

Or an auto memory manager feature, a bit like my Strictly Sitemap plugin, which checks the amount of memory used on the last posting and keeps setting the memory to the right size on each post e.g the last size + 10%, or if it goes down, the last size used. Or allow you to specify an amount to be set in admin.

Tell me which feature you like or would like to see in the next Strictly-Software AutoTags plugin!

You can let me know here or on my Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/strictlysoftware

Monday 9 February 2015

Speeding up Chrome can KILL IT!

Speeding up Chrome can kill it!

By Strictly-Software

Lately I have been really disappointed with the performance of my preferred browser Chrome.

I moved from FireFox to Chrome when the amount of plugins on FireFox made it too slow to work with however this was when Chrome was a clean, fast browser. Now it has just as many plugins available to install as FireFox and the performance has deteriorated constantly over the past few versions.

I am a developer so having 20+ tabs open in my browser is not unusual however when they are all hanging for no reason with "resolving host" messages in the status bar something is wrong.

I have even removed all my plugins that I had installed and decided to leave that to FireFox if I need to test different agents, hacking and so on. However even with a simple install the performance has been crap lately!

Therefore looked up on the web for tips on speeding up Chrome and found this article:

http://digiwonk.wonderhowto.com/how-to/10-speed-hacks-thatll-make-google-chrome-blazing-fast-your-computer-0155989/

It basically tells you some tricks to speed up Chrome by modifying some settings by going to chrome://flags/ in your address bar.

There is a warning at the top of the page that says:

WARNING These experimental features may change, break or disappear at any time. We make absolutely no guarantees about what may happen if you turn one of these experiments on, and your browser may even spontaneously combust. Jokes aside, your browser may delete all your data or your security and privacy could be compromised in unexpected ways. Any experiments that you enable will be enabled for all users of this browser. Please proceed with caution. Interested in cool new Chrome features? Try our beta channel at chrome.com/beta.

So these are all "experimental" features and from the sounds of it they could even make it's security and performance worse not better. Even a few of the tweaks suggested by the article had already disappeared from the settings page.

I did what was still available and a few more tweaks after careful consideration and what happened?

Well at first some pages seemed to load quicker but then I found that:

  • Some sites without a www. sub domain wouldn't load.
  • Some pages wouldn't load at all.
  • When I came into work today even though a Chrome process was running with 0 CPU usage nothing was displayed.
I had to re-boot, and try 3 times to open Chrome before getting back to the chrome://flags/  page and restoring all the defaults. Since then everything has been okay.

So if your going to tweak be careful - it could take down your whole browser!

The best way to speed it up is to remove all the plugins and add-ons and leave that to FireFox. Turn off 3rd party cookies and any 3rd party services that involve constant lookups and try to keep it clean and simple.

It seems that with the over usage of AJAX and sites like Facebook/LinkedIn/Google+ where as you type it constantly looks up the word to see if it matches a name or contact that this "API JIZZ" as I call it has really slowed down the web.

Just by having Google+, Facebook and LinkedIn open at the same time can eat up your memory and I'm on a quad core 64 bit machine.

In my opinion there should be settings to enable you to turn off the API JIZZ and flashy features that rely on lots of JavaScript and AJAX.

It slows down your computer and is not needed most of the time. Having big database lookups on each keystroke is obviously going to use up lots of memory so it should be an option you can disable.

Anyway that's down to the developers of all these social sites who seem to love AJAX for everything. A simple submit button would do in a lot of cases!


Friday 6 February 2015

New Premium Version of Strictly Auto Tags version 2.9.9

New Premium Version of Strictly Auto Tags version 2.9.9

By Strictly-Software

Did you know you can buy even more Strictly-Software.com products on Etsy.com than on my own site www.strictly-software.com.

This includes special configuration coupons which enable you to hire me to configure your plugins on your site including Strictly-Software AutoTags and Strictly-Software TweetBOT.

However if you follow the settings, and the process for debugging the Readme.txt file you should be okay.

Despite that sometimes you may have a site with an unusual system setup or issues with your chosen options

To get me to help, you can now buy coupons from my shop on Etsy.com to allow me to check your system set-up and sort out any configuration settings that maybe set incorrectly.

The new popular WordPress plugin: Strictly-Software AutoTag premium version can either be bought for just £40 on www.strictly-software.com or for the same amount on my Etsy.com shop. The coupon for help is just £20.

New features in Strictly AutoTags version 2.9.9 include:
  • New option to override the siteurl value from the WordPress getOption('siteurl') function which returns your site url e.g http://www.mysite.com. This is appended to the front of any deeplinked tags e.g http://www.mysite.com/tags/frankel. However if you have an unusual site set-up or folder structure then this can sometimes cause you problems and generate 404 errors if the tag link is clicked. Therefore you can now override the value for deep linking with a hard coded value which is better than re-setting the siteurl value in the wp_optiions table.
  • A new help section at the top which includes the test post article you should always try to save a draft post with Auto Discovery enabled whenever you make changes to see if the plugin is configured correctly. If no tags are generated there is either a problem with other plugins, your configuration settings or your system.
  • Added links to my Facebook/strictlysoftware where you can find lots of help related to my products including detailed debugging steps and notifications on problems. Please "Like" me if you can.
  • Added links to my article on my Facebook page about steps to take when debugging Strictly AutoTags 
  • Bug Fix - On some options (checkbox / boolean) the system wasn't remembering your old settings on page refreshes. This should now be fixed.


Buy Strictly AutoTags version 2.9.9 now!



Buy a Strictly AutoTags Config Coupon now!

Buy a one time use coupon that offers you my time and expertise setting up the plugin on your site.

With an admin login and some time getting to know your content I can iron out any problems and configure the settings for your site and plugin correctly.

If you have trouble configuring your plugin or need help setting it up and getting the correct settings for your site then you can purchase a coupon for £20 which gives you my time and help on your system.

On receipt of payment of the coupon all I will need is access to your admin area with permission to change the plugin settings so that I can set it up for you and recommend settings for what you want to achieve.

Every site is different so every sites configuration will be as well.

View the new plugin download page at www.strictly-software.com