WordPress plugin: What Would Seth Godin Do

Seth Godin advocates using cookies to distinguish between new and returning visitors to your site:

One opportunity that’s underused is the idea of using cookies to treat returning visitors differently than newbies. It’s more work at first, but it can offer two experiences to two different sorts of people. (Source: In the Middle, Starting)

I built this WordPress plugin to implement Seth Godin’s idea. For WordPress users it reduces the “work at first” to almost nothing. Installation is simple:

  1. Download the WWSGD WordPress plugin and unzip it.
  2. Copy what_would_seth_godin_do.php to your WordPress plugins folder.
  3. Activate the plugin in the Plugins area.
  4. Customize settings in the Settings area.

By default, new visitors to your blog will see a small box above each post containing the words “If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!” After 5 visits the message disappears. You can customize this message, its lifespan, and its location.

This plugin requires cookies. Users without support for cookies will always see the new visitor message. It has been tested with WordPress 2.0 – 2.7.1, but it may work with earlier versions.

New visitors will appreciate some context and background information about your site. This is your chance to offer them a special welcome and invite them to become permanent subscribers!

DOWNLOAD the What Would Seth Godin Do WordPress plugin (v 1.7)

I can be reached at richard AT richardkmiller DOT com. I appreciate comments and suggestions.

FOR OTHER PLATFORMS:
(I have not tested these.)

If you want to be notified the next time I write something, sign up for email alerts or subscribe to the RSS feed. Thanks for reading.

671 Responses to “WordPress plugin: What Would Seth Godin Do”

  1. HandySolo Says:
    December 12th, 2006 at 1:25 pm
    Neat idea. Is there a way to contrain it to only single post views?

    Having the box on every post of the main page is a bit… scary!

  2. Björn Lindström Says:
    December 12th, 2006 at 1:50 pm
    It seems to me that it would be a good idea not to show the message at all to clients that doesn’t allow setting cookies, thus making the site look normal to people who generally block cookies, and to search engines and such.
  3. Richard K Miller Says:
    December 12th, 2006 at 2:17 pm
    Handy & Bjorn — these are good ideas. I’ll add them and repost a version 1.1.
  4. Marco Raaphorst Says:
    December 12th, 2006 at 4:02 pm
    Great idea! I’ll check when I have a bit time left.
  5. Orlando Says:
    December 13th, 2006 at 7:58 am
    Nice idea.
  6. Richard K Miller Says:
    December 13th, 2006 at 10:32 pm
    Björn: As far as I know, checking for cookie support requires two page loads, which I may not have for first-time users to the site. I may have to think about this one some more.
  7. danithew Says:
    December 19th, 2006 at 3:52 pm
    A-ha! You write WordPress plugins!

    (adding you to list of people I talk to about plugin ideas)

  8. Christer Edwards Says:
    December 19th, 2006 at 9:00 pm
    This is a good idea. I’ve recently started following SG’s blog, which has a lot of good info, but hadn’t made it to the posts you referred to.

    I think I’ve found one more feed to add to the reader. Thanks

  9. Modulus Says:
    January 2nd, 2007 at 9:50 am
    Odd… I love the idea but something seems to be off. I set up my browser (IE7) to accept all cookies and yet, after 4 page loads, I still see the message inviting people to join my RSS feed. Any idea what’s going on?
  10. Richard K Miller Says:
    January 2nd, 2007 at 10:19 pm
    Modulus, does IE7 let you see your cookies? If so, you should see one called “wwsgd_visits” and it contains the number of visits to the site, and it should increment each time you visit. Is that part working?
  11. Darren Says:
    February 8th, 2007 at 3:54 pm
    Great idea! +1 on differentiating between the home page and individual archive pages.
  12. Darren Says:
    February 8th, 2007 at 3:59 pm
    Hmm…I’m having the same bug as Modulus. I checked my cookies, and while thec cookie for your site is incrementing each time I visit, the cookie for mine stays at ‘1′.
  13. Jean Says:
    February 9th, 2007 at 10:29 am
    well i just found this pluggin and downloaded it and was curious to install it directly and I am satified with it, thank you a lot, you can see it at my personal blog http://jean.ghalo.com/2007/02/08/6-steps-for-blogging/ posts, it is a real support and i believe it will get the nbr of my RSS readers higher…

    Regards,
    Jean

  14. Bes Z Says:
    February 9th, 2007 at 10:01 pm
    Hi Richard,

    Thank you for such a wonderful plugin. I tried it with WP 2.1 and it worked on most pages.

    On pages that use the Comment Analysis plugin:

    http://www.lambic.co.uk/blog/wordpress-plugins/

    I see the following error message at the top [I have removed the path urls]:

    Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent in what_would_seth_godin_do.php on line 86

    The page does load, but with the above message at the very top. I am not sure if this issue is because of a conflict with the Comment Analysis plugin or with WP 2.1 itself. Just wanted to let you know.

    Thanks again for releasing this plugin.

  15. Richard K Miller Says:
    February 10th, 2007 at 2:29 pm
    @Bes Z
    Thanks for your comment. The problem may be extra blank lines in the plugin outside of the < ?php ?> tags. I don’t think the plugin has any extra blank lines but they may have been inadvertently inserted when you put the plugin on your site. You can open the plugin file with a text editor and make sure there are no blank lines at the beginning of the file before “< ?php" or at the end of the file after the "?>“.
  16. Bes Z Says:
    February 14th, 2007 at 12:28 pm
    Richard,
    Thanks for the explanation. I just tried it and removed the spaces and unfortunately the same error still shows at the top.
  17. Boris Says:
    February 16th, 2007 at 3:14 am
    Great idea! Simple and elegant and very effective. RSS readers have doubled since I installed your plugin.

    Thanks…

  18. Joe Says:
    February 16th, 2007 at 3:08 pm
    Hey Richard,
    I didn’t read all the comments, but what about if the newcomer lands on an individual post, say from a Google search?
    Is there any way to show the caption there also?
  19. Richard K Miller Says:
    February 16th, 2007 at 3:17 pm
    @Joe
    Yes, this plugin also works for individual posts in addition to the home page.
  20. Michael Says:
    February 25th, 2007 at 9:48 am
    That has got to be the best name for a plug in ever. Terrific idea too. Thanks. I just love the WP community for coming up with such great and varied plug ins.
  21. noah kagan Says:
    March 3rd, 2007 at 6:40 pm
    I installed it and love it. It might be nice to have an easier way to move around where the message shows. Anyways, beggars can’t be choosers.

    Check it out on okdork.com

  22. Astorg Says:
    March 14th, 2007 at 9:11 pm
    I would definitely want to install this, but not if it appears on every post on the home page, which looks rather like overkill.

    IMHO, it would make more sense to have it appear (1) on individual post pages when people open them (which means they have sufficient interest to justify sending them the incitement to subscribe) and possibly also (2) at the top of the home page (but once only).

  23. Richard K Miller Says:
    March 14th, 2007 at 11:40 pm
    @Astorg
    These are fair suggestions. I don’t have a next version planned yet, but these would be good features. Thanks.
  24. Avinash Says:
    March 22nd, 2007 at 2:18 pm
    What a wonderful idea + plugin! Thanks for developing this highly useful plugin!

    Kind regards,
    - Avi

  25. Stephanie Says:
    March 23rd, 2007 at 5:36 pm
    Hmm, I’d like to install this, but not if it’s going to be at the top of every post on the home page. Otherwise, I love the idea. Is there some mailing list or something I could subscribe to, in case you ever design a second version?
  26. Matt Ellsworth Says:
    March 25th, 2007 at 6:30 pm
    This is a great plugin – thanks for that – we have implemented here – and we plan on adding it to several other blogs as well.
  27. Jim Kukral Says:
    March 26th, 2007 at 12:03 am
    Smart plugin. Gonna test it out, thanks.
  28. Ben Klinger Says:
    March 27th, 2007 at 11:23 am
    what an awesome plugin!
    is there a way to display it above the title of the post rather than above the content?

    thanks so much for writing this!

  29. Richard K Miller Says:
    March 29th, 2007 at 10:35 pm
    @Stephanie
    I’ll see what I can do about limiting the notice to one post only. That will be in the next version.

    @Ben Klinger
    Thanks. I don’t think the WordPress API offers a way to put the notice above the title. The notice gets lumped in with the content, either before or after it.

  30. Apple Says:
    April 6th, 2007 at 5:07 am
    Great trick… It is much better than a dull RSS icon lost in sidebar…
  31. Cormac Moylan Says:
    April 10th, 2007 at 3:06 am
    Thanks for the great plugin Richard.
  32. Dan Says:
    April 12th, 2007 at 2:18 pm
    Great plugin, thankyou!
  33. Nick Halstead Says:
    April 21st, 2007 at 5:47 am
    Thanks richard! Great little plugin now being used on http://blog.assembleron.com/
  34. Ralf Skirr Says:
    May 9th, 2007 at 12:59 pm
    Hi Richard,

    This has to be one of my new favorite plugins for wordpress.

    Thanks for sharing

  35. Richard K Miller Says:
    May 9th, 2007 at 4:11 pm
    Thanks Ralf, I appreciate it!
  36. Jesse Stay Says:
    May 12th, 2007 at 12:15 am
    Awesome Richard! Implementing this on my blog right now. Everyone be sure to digg this to the front page of Digg.com: http://digg.com/tech_news/What_Would_Seth_Godin_Do_He_Would_Use_This_Word_Press_Plug_In
  37. Jeremy Ricketts Says:
    July 6th, 2007 at 11:55 am
    I’d like to hear what people think about hiding/showing ads based on visits. For instance, one the first couple visits to a site, it might be good to hide google ads so that the visitor is shown a more content-focused blog or page. More inviting. True this mean less overall click conversions, but I wonder if that is a price one might be willing to pay while their blog or site gets off the ground. Gathering an endearing audience from the start might be better than an influx of quick but non-regular reader base. Thoughts?
  38. Talkhomebusinessblog Says:
    July 7th, 2007 at 9:15 pm
    Hope this excellent plugin will greatly increase number of our RSS subscribers soon! We barely just begun…

    Thanks Richard

  39. Ken Says:
    July 9th, 2007 at 10:47 pm
    Hi

    I installed your plugin and everything works fine except one thing. The link for the rss feed gives a 404 ‘not found’ error.

    The rss link from the built in cutline chicklet works fine, it links to “http://kenstech.com/blog/index.php/feed/”

    I went in and edited the plugin so that the line in the href that read “.get_option(’home’).”/index.php/feed/ ” was replaced with the above hard coded link directly to my feed.

    This unfortunately did not work. Even though I edited the plugin, the link still shows up without the “index.php” bit between the “/blog/” and “/feed/” in the path.

    This makes no sense to me since I changed the path. Yet it still shows the old path and still gives me the 404.

    I hope this isn’t too confusing. Any help would be appreciated.

    Ken Steen

  40. Ken Says:
    July 9th, 2007 at 11:26 pm
    GAH!

    Never mind….

    I feel like an idiot. I figured it out, thanks anyway.

    Ken

  41. Richard K Miller Says:
    July 10th, 2007 at 7:01 am
    Jeremy Ricketts: This is an interesting idea. I’ve also seen the opposite proposed as well — turning off ads for your longtime readers. It’d be interesting to try both.
  42. A Grandiose Blog Says:
    July 21st, 2007 at 9:00 am
    Hey thanks, for the great plugin! I’ve got it installed and it’s working great. I did edit the default text somewhat to try and increase comments also, you can see it at http://www.agrandioseblog.com.

    Out of curiosity, who has the best custom message that has increased RSS subs and comments?

    Thanks

    A Grandiose Blog – Cocktails, Gadgets & More …

  43. Richard K Miller Says:
    July 21st, 2007 at 10:24 am
    A Grandiose Blog: One use of the plugin I recently saw and really like is at Upper Fort Stewart. At the bottom of each post there’s a paragraph that reads “Wait, there’s more!” It doesn’t wrap the message in the dotted line, so it flows well. I like it.
  44. Celebrienne Says:
    July 22nd, 2007 at 10:48 am
    Richard, thanks a bunch for this plugin. It’s a great and useful plugin. I use it on my celebrity blog and display a modified message. The message displays 3 times to new visitors at the top of the page.

    The plugin works great on IE 7 (couldn’t test it under IE6), but under Firefox the welcome message is always getting displayed. It just won’t go away though cookies are turned on. When I took a look at the FF cookies for my blog I couldn’t find “wwsgd_visits” there.

    Any suggestions? Does this only happen to me or is this a known bug/issue? Maybe it’s my fault, but I just can’t figure out where I could have gone wrong… :-/

  45. Celebrienne Says:
    July 22nd, 2007 at 10:52 am
    Forgot something… Is it possible to prevent bots (like the Googlebot) from indexing the welcome message without changing the message position? I just noticed that Google indexed the message on some of my pages.
  46. satest Says:
    July 22nd, 2007 at 11:36 pm
    I get a 404, page not found error on the feed link, after activating the WWSGD plugin. A similar problem is quoted above, but the solution is not specified..

    Any body please help..

    Thanks in advance..

  47. Richard K Miller Says:
    July 23rd, 2007 at 7:14 pm
    Celebrienne: I visited your site in Firefox and the message disappeared as expected. I don’t know a way of excluding the plugin content from search enigne indexes (though I could see the value in a tag like this.)

    satest: The 404 error above seemed to be resolved in the following comment. Any luck with your site?

  48. Celebrienne Says:
    July 23rd, 2007 at 8:21 pm
    Thanks for taking the time to review my problem, Richard. I really appreciate this. Good to know that at least it seems to work for all the rest of the website’s visitors. Problem might be (my) Firefox then.

    Hopefully, the Googlebot is also able to store cookies (?), so the message won’t be displayed after the first 3 times it crawls the site’s content.

  49. satest Says:
    July 24th, 2007 at 5:31 am
    No, the 404 error is not resolved yet. Do we need any htaccess setting for this to work?
    I set the .htaccess file as

    RewriteEngine On
    RewriteBase /blog/
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
    RewriteRule . /blog/index.php [L]

    Still it does not work.

    Thanks.

  50. Richard K Miller Says:
    July 24th, 2007 at 9:31 am
    satest: You shouldn’t have to change your .htaccess file at all. The WordPress defaults are fine. Does the plugin work when you delete the .htaccess file?
  51. satest Says:
    July 25th, 2007 at 12:25 am
    When deleting the htaccess file, when I click on the feed link a popup is generated..

    which is a: application/x-httpd-php
    from: http://...

    What would firefox do with this file?
    open
    save to disk

    Many thanks for your valuable response..

  52. Richard K Miller Says:
    July 25th, 2007 at 7:38 am
    satest: Not sure why you’re having that trouble. It sounds like it’s more than a matter of the plugin.
  53. FatMan Says:
    July 25th, 2007 at 8:58 am
    I have the same 404 error problem here is the actual response to clicking oon the RSS feed. I am using wordpress 2.2.1. Can you solve this mystery?

    thx

    fatman

    Not Found
    The requested URL /fmblog/feed/ was not found on this server.

    Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
    Apache/1.3.37 Server at fatmanmelts.com Port 80

  54. Tal Galili Says:
    July 26th, 2007 at 8:25 am
    Hi.

    I love your plugin. BUT:
    I am having problem using it with the hebrew language (utf-8, right to left).
    Could a fix to that be implemented into the plugin ?

    thanks,
    Tal.

  55. satest Says:
    July 26th, 2007 at 8:52 am
    I got the cause of my problem. The problem was with permalinks.
    I was using the year/month/day type permalink.

    I just switched the permalink structure to the default one and now, it works fine with
    /blog/?feed=rss2 link

    But, the mystery is that it worked earlier for me even with the latter permalink structure.

    I have added some themes and plugins newly. I doubt that some files in root and wp-includes folder is created by the plugins and may be creating some problems.

  56. Richard K Miller Says:
    July 26th, 2007 at 11:31 pm
    FatMan: Does the 404 error occur only when the WWSGD plugin is enabled? Is it fixed by changing your permalinks structure, as “satest” mentioned?

    Tal: How does the plugin misbehave when enabled on your blog? I’d like to ensure it works for R-to-L languages too, so I appreciate your feedback.

  57. lisa Says:
    July 27th, 2007 at 12:38 am
    Hi. I installed the plugin and when I went to options to edit the message content and saved it – I lost the entire message and now when I try to type it in again and save it – it will not save.

    The number of times I want it to show to visitors (example #3) will show up in the message box and that’s it. No message.

    Perhaps I did something to the code. I even tried deleting it and re-installing it. But the same thing. I’m on wordpress 2.2.1, using the firefox browser.

    Thanks so much – I can’t wait to get it to work!

  58. poer Says:
    July 30th, 2007 at 4:10 am
    thanks for the plugin, use it in my blog.
  59. Steve Renner Says:
    August 9th, 2007 at 5:58 am
    Wow Richard,
    What a great plugin, you should be charging for this, Really!

    (Of course after I download my copy :-)

    All The Best,

    Steve

  60. DawnsRecipes Says:
    August 9th, 2007 at 12:38 pm
    I love it! I gave it a try and it worked perfectly. I had been looking for a good way to hint at this in my posts, and you’ve provided an ideal solution. Thank you!
  61. Josh - Hosting Says:
    August 11th, 2007 at 9:33 am
    Thank you for this plugin! Some of my readers (of http://www.jospostma.nl & http://www.computer-back.nl) are very pleased with this option. I will recommend this plugin/download for Wordpress!
  62. Michael Says:
    August 14th, 2007 at 10:45 am
    Hi
    Nice plug in, i installed it on my word press 2.2 blog with no problems, check it out dude, at http://my-ad-sense.com
  63. Sean's Blog Says:
    September 11th, 2007 at 9:46 am
    What Would Seth Godin Do?…

    If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. This would mean that you’ll never miss a post! Thanks for visiting! SeanA brilliant Wordpress plugin I’ve come across lately is “What Would Seth Godin Do?”
    This plugi…

  64. michele Says:
    September 25th, 2007 at 4:36 am
    I have an idea for this awesome plugin, there is a problem when a spider-bot surfs my blog. When it arrives on my blog your plugin does the job and display the sentence I set, but in this way the bot save the sentence and displays it on the relative search engine.
    I think you could modify the plugin putting conditional tags if the surfer is human or a bot. If it is a bot the plugin doesn’t show the sentence otherwise it shows.
  65. Richard K Miller Says:
    September 25th, 2007 at 9:27 pm
    michele: Thanks for your idea on not showing the message to search engine bots. I will add that to the list of development ideas.
  66. Dave Bradley Science Says:
    September 28th, 2007 at 1:51 am
    A rather different approach I use on Sciencebase.com is to check a visitor’s referrers, if they came from a search engine, then the site displays a little blurb along the lines you suggest, adds a selection of posts related to their search term and below that displays the most likely post.

    Obviously, it does nothing for people who hit the site direct or who come from a link on another site, but I figured that organic SE traffic is the most transient so catching the attention of those visitors probably works best. Sciencebase.com had 2745 RSS subscribers and 1000 Yahoo Group members last time I checked my stats, so something must be working.

    db

  67. Michael Says:
    September 28th, 2007 at 12:36 pm
    Hi Richard,

    Could you please help?
    I’m having the same problem as Comment 57 from Lisa in that whatever I do to edit the message, when I update it, the message is cleared and the number of Occurrences appears where the message should be. I cannot find a solution in the comments.

    I have Deactivated, reinstalled, cleared cookies and tried whatever I can think of – no joy.

    Question – where is the text stored? Perhaps I can update it manually.

    Many thanks
    Michael

  68. Michael Says:
    September 29th, 2007 at 1:12 am
    I guess I should mention that I am using Wordpress 2.3, in case that makes a difference.

    Also relevant is that after Deactivating, deleting the plugin file and re-uploading the original file, then Activating, the original message is not re-instated. The only message that appears is the previously entered number of occurrences.

    All very strange.

  69. Richard K Miller Says:
    September 29th, 2007 at 12:03 pm
    Dave Bradley: Fantastic idea. Perhaps looking for search engine referrers ought to be an option for this plugin.

    Michael (#66): Sorry to hear of your troubles with the plugin. The plugin stores the message and number of times to display the message using the WordPress get_option() and update_option() functions. In the database, they’re stored in the “wp_options” table in the “wwsgd_settings” row. Perhaps by deleting that row (and only that row) you can reset the plugin to work properly. (Please don’t attempt if you’re not comfortable with that.) If that doesn’t work, please email me at richard AT this domain.

  70. Michael Says:
    September 29th, 2007 at 6:47 pm
    Richard,

    Worked like a charm! Thank you so much.

    The problem was that there were invalid characters in the database row because I copied and pasted my message. MySQL obviously doesn’t know how to handle this. Tut, tut.

    You might want to include a note to this effect in your Installation Notes. You might also want to ‘SEO’ your plugin name for the search term ‘first time visitor’.

    A brilliant, brilliant plugin. Thank you so much for providing it, and for your support in answering my question. Much appreciated.

    Be well, be bad, stay sane.
    Maybe I shouldn’t say that… after reading your beliefs :-)

  71. Nigel Lane Says:
    September 30th, 2007 at 11:36 pm
    Hi

    I like the idea but I am having trouble stopping Seth doing his thing. I have kept the default setting to 3 but it keeps popping up for me every time. I have checked the cookie and it shows 8 – and adds one every visit.

    Could it be because it is my own blog? Or will everyone see the message every time?

    Thanks

  72. Ed Fladung Says:
    October 5th, 2007 at 2:34 pm
    Hey Richard, great plugin. just wanted to drop you a note that I noticed something funky: I posted a blog post this morning about a dive into mark post, the pingback to his post contained part of the WWSGD message I have on my site for newbies, you can see the comment here. I assume this happens only on new sites that i’m sending pingbacks to.

    just thought you might want to know.

    thanks,

    // Ed

  73. Richard K Miller Says:
    October 8th, 2007 at 8:59 pm
    Nigel Lane: I wonder if there’s a discrepancy between the URL of your blog and the URL of your cookie. I will send you a test version of the plugin to see if it helps.
  74. Aseem Kishore Says:
    October 9th, 2007 at 9:01 am
    Hi Richard,

    Great plugin, have been using it for a while now! Was wondering though if there was a way to make it invisible to the search engine robots? When I look at my site’s cached pages, I noticed that it’s on all of them. Any way to stop that???

    Thanks!

  75. Richard K Miller Says:
    October 9th, 2007 at 9:41 pm
    Aseem Kishore: I think that is a fine idea. I will add that feature to the next release.
  76. Billy Says:
    October 12th, 2007 at 3:46 am
    Thank you for this plugin. I will recommend this plugin/download for Wordpress!

    Thnx

    Billy

  77. dave Says:
    October 14th, 2007 at 3:52 am
    Great plugin ! But is there any way it only show up at posts on not on the excerpts on the homepage when placing it on top of the posts ?

    Dave

  78. Richard K Miller Says:
    October 16th, 2007 at 7:31 am
    dave: Good idea. I will add this feature to allow you to display the message on posts or the home page or both.
  79. Jon Tillman Says:
    October 23rd, 2007 at 3:32 pm
    Let me second Ed’s comment. Every time I send a trackback to another blog, the WWSGD verbiage shows up there, making me look like a very confused spammer. Any chance that while you’re planning a new version that avoids SE robots you could look into avoiding other sorts of non-humans, specifically trackback grabbing non-humans?
  80. Colin Jensen Says:
    December 3rd, 2007 at 6:30 am
    May we have a preview button? Thank you Richard K Miller.
  81. Richard K Miller Says:
    December 4th, 2007 at 6:56 pm
    Colin Jensen: Yes, I’ll add a preview option to a future release. Thanks for the suggestion.
  82. Scott Ficek Says:
    December 6th, 2007 at 9:18 pm
    Richard-
    What a creative plug-in. I want to use it at the top of the post, but somehow it grabs the first URL that is contained in the post and overwrites the feed URL in the pop-up.

    Very weird. It does not do that on the bottom of the post.

    Any thoughts?

  83. Richard K Miller Says:
    December 8th, 2007 at 3:12 pm
    Scott: I couldn’t see the problem you described when I visited your site. Is it working now?
  84. Pete Says:
    December 18th, 2007 at 8:07 am
    I came here to report an issue with pingbacks, but it seems that Ed Fladung has already mentioned it.
  85. Michael Aulia Says:
    December 20th, 2007 at 4:12 pm
    Cool plugin..better than subscribe to reminder plugin which I already I installed
  86. Abby Says:
    December 23rd, 2007 at 12:05 am
    Excellent plugin Richard. Thanks. It worked on first install and a tiny modification on the border and it’s perfect!
  87. Kristoffer Forsgren Says:
    January 26th, 2008 at 12:56 pm
    I have problems with this plugin some times. It seems as if it conflicts with other plugins in certain circumstances (for instance dagon site map generator).

    “Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by (output started at /path_to_plugins/dd-sitemap-gen/lang/Swedish.php:1) in /path_to_plugins/what_would_seth_godin_do.php on line 91″

    It’s always line 91 in what_would_seth_godin_do.php that is mentioned. This is a really, really annoying problem and really causes some serious problems.

    Any proposal to a solution? I’ve already removed any extra line breaks after the php tags in the plugins.

  88. Pete Says:
    February 3rd, 2008 at 11:49 am
    Kristoffer: the most likely explanation is that the first line of Swedish.php is blank (ie, the blank line isn’t after the closing php tag, but before the opening one)
  89. Binh Nguyen Says:
    February 5th, 2008 at 8:34 am
    Does it use Javascript to write the message? If not than it’s not what I want because I’m using Super Cache, which will interfere with any plugin.
  90. Jen Leheny Says:
    February 6th, 2008 at 7:42 am
    What a fabulous plugin – I have just installed it on my site with a custom message. Have a look here: http://www.jenleheny.com and feel free to copy my wording if you like it. :)
  91. Richard McLaughlin Says:
    February 6th, 2008 at 2:00 pm
    wonderful idea, thanks for putting it together.
  92. zahid Says:
    February 9th, 2008 at 1:04 am
    I have a problem with installing the plugin on wordpress… i can’t find ‘wordpress plugin’ button in my account. Can u pls help?
    Z
  93. Richard K Miller Says:
    February 9th, 2008 at 5:48 pm
    zahid: The plugins option is available if you install WordPress (WordPress.org) on your own website, but may not be available if you’re using WordPress.com.
  94. Tucker Says:
    February 11th, 2008 at 5:01 pm
    Hi there,

    I love your WWSGD? plugin, but I’ve come across an issue I can’t figure out.

    I remember when I first downloaded the plugin (I don’t think it was from this site, but from a WP plugin site that listed it), there were comments asking if it could be used outside of posts. The response was that it couldn’t.

    Well, I found a way to. I inserted a line of PHP code in the index.php file of my template that did several things all in one line:

    1. It included an If statement to check the number of visits — the same statement from the plugin.
    2. It used an echo statement to create a named div.
    3. It used the echo statement to append the function $wwsgd_settings['new_visitor_message'] (taken from the plugin).
    4. And it then appended the div close tag to the end of the echo statement.

    And it worked. The rest of the plugin functioned normally. I just called the output function from a different location.

    I commented out the add_filter function in the plugin, since I was calling the output from a different location.

    However, it doesn’t appear to work in IE6. I’ve set my “repetition” to 4 visits. But even after twenty page views, the message still appears. Meanwhile, it works like a charm in Firefox.

    Thinking that it might be because IE didn’t recognize my PHP workaround in the index file, I removed the comment brackets from the plugin file, so that the message would reappear within the individual posts.

    In Firefox, it worked normally. The message showed up in the posts, then disappeared on the 5th visit. However, in IE6, nothing changed. Even with the plugin functioning normally (i.e., without my hack), the message shows up in the post and never leaves.

    So I’m wondering if there could be some incompatibility between WWSGD? and IE6? And if so, have you already seen this, and do you have a solution?

    I’d appreciate your help. I’m a big fan of the plugin, and want to make it work as advertised for all of my readers.

    Thanks!

  95. Tucker Says:
    February 11th, 2008 at 5:21 pm
    Update to my comment above:

    I deleted my cookies in IE, and started all over, and voila — it worked exactly as expected!

    So, no worries. Nothing wrong with your plugin at all. It was an IE problem… isn’t it always?

    My current blurb includes a parenthetical stating that the welcome message should disappear after 4 page views. I think I’ll turn that into a link, to a page which will inform readers that if it doesn’t go away, they should delete their cookies.

    Thanks for the great plugin! You can see it at work at http://www.respectkobe.com.

  96. Summy Says:
    February 14th, 2008 at 4:04 pm
    I like seth godin. I like this idea. I like the plugin.

    Thanks.

  97. brainsolid Says:
    February 17th, 2008 at 2:59 am
    Great plugin, but I have 1 problem, maybe you can help me solve it?
    So, in original “blog-type” themes plugin works perfectly. But in “magazine-style” (custom home.php) this small box not shows. What code I must put in my home.php to show small box in custom place on the page?
  98. Mark Says:
    February 22nd, 2008 at 9:10 am
    Excellent Plugin thank you.. have just added it to my site.
  99. Gunter Says:
    February 26th, 2008 at 12:24 pm
    This idea of sorting new and returned visitors has great potential. I will definitely try your plugin. Thanks
  100. Jay Says:
    February 27th, 2008 at 7:22 pm
    Great plugin! I just need to get it in the sidebar instead… A suggestion that’d be great is to be able to use another call thing such as a line of php to call it instead. With that I mean put the line of php anywhere and get the message there.

    I’ve been trying to get a hold of Tucker but I can’t find an email or another way to contact him on his site. :(

    Anyone else (or Tucker if you read this) that could tell me what to do in order to do what Tucker did? I’m not a php coder but my copy/paste skills are excellent!

  101. Richard K Miller Says:
    March 1st, 2008 at 11:34 pm
    brainsolid: I plan to release a version that will allow the message to be placed anywhere using a custom PHP tag.
  102. Peter Says:
    March 10th, 2008 at 6:01 am
    Tracking the visitors, new and returned is really great. Thanks, downloading it now.
  103. Shanti Says:
    March 14th, 2008 at 4:40 am
    I have Blogger but I want this for my blog too. What can I do?
  104. Richard K Miller Says:
    March 15th, 2008 at 12:23 pm
    Shanti: I don’t believe Blogger provides any mechanism to add “plugins” for additional functionality like this, as WordPress does. Perhaps you should migrate to WordPress?
  105. Uncle Jack (Jack LeVine) Says:
    March 16th, 2008 at 1:40 am
    we’ve gone from 10 to 31 subscribers (which is a lot for a niche real estate blog about 50’s and 60’s homes and neighborhoods in Las Vegas) without it. Can’t wait to see what will happen when we plug it in on Monday.
  106. Richard Butler Says:
    March 17th, 2008 at 12:48 am
    Its timing that i get this plugin now!
  107. Richard K Miller Says:
    March 18th, 2008 at 6:10 pm
    Uncle Jack: Interesting website. I grew up in Las Vegas so your pictures are like candy to me.
  108. Franca Richard Says:
    March 18th, 2008 at 10:46 pm
    Really useful, thanks!!
  109. Johan Says:
    March 26th, 2008 at 8:05 am
    Hi Being ignorant; I get the idea this plugin will work with any newsletter subscription manager like aweber.com for example. Am I correct? Regards and Tanks Johan
  110. Richard K Miller Says:
    March 26th, 2008 at 9:41 pm
    Johan: This plugin can display any HTML, including a link to aweber.com if you like.
  111. Kraig Grayson Says:
    March 27th, 2008 at 5:29 am
    I was looking for this type of plugin for a while now. Thank you for offering it to us. It should surely help to boost the number of RSS subscribers in a shorter period of time.
  112. John Lockwood Says:
    April 5th, 2008 at 8:05 pm
    Thanks for the plugin. I realize some people may have requested this as a feature, but to me, setting the path in the setcookie call inside of wwsgd_set_cookie is a bug. The message should appear when a user visits the site, and should not be re-set to $wwsgd_visits == 1 whenever they go to a different directory, such as a page located on the root. I would argue the code should read:

    setcookie(’wwsgd_visits’, $wwsgd_visits, time()+60*60*24*365);

  113. Matt Says:
    April 21st, 2008 at 8:34 am
    Hi, Richard. I tried emailing you, but it bounced back with the error “550 550 Unrouteable address.”

    How does one change the plugin so it points to a Feedburner feed instead of the site’s own feed?

    Thanks.

  114. Richard K Miller Says:
    April 21st, 2008 at 8:45 pm
    Matt: The email problem should be fixed now.

    If you’re familiar with HTML, you can change the link in the WWSGD settings to a FeedBurner link.

    However, it may be easier to use the FeedBurner plugin to automatically redirect traffic for your feed to FeedBurner:

    http://www.google.com/support/feedburner/bin/answer.py?answer=78483&topic=13252

  115. Matt Says:
    April 22nd, 2008 at 9:46 am
    Richard: Thanks for your reply. I actually have Feedburner’s plugin installed and activated, but I seem to remember it not working within the WWSGD plugin. I could easily be wrong, though. I’ll reinstall the unbroken WWSGD plugin, flush caches and cookies and whatnot and have another go. I’ll let you know what happens.
  116. Matt Says:
    April 22nd, 2008 at 1:00 pm
    Richard: Well, don’t know what was going on before, but everything’s doing what it’s supposed to now. And I also see that, if I’d wanted, I could have just changed the link in the welcome text box. Duh.

    Okay, thanks.

  117. Richard K Miller Says:
    April 22nd, 2008 at 11:10 pm
    Matt: I’m glad it’s all cleared up now!
  118. Sam Says:
    April 23rd, 2008 at 1:33 am
    Richard, great plugin, i was just wondering if there is any way i can move the message to the top of the page above all the posts?
    Many Thanks
  119. Colleen Says:
    May 22nd, 2008 at 5:33 am
    Thanks for the great plugin! Definitely a useful tool!
  120. Luis Gross Says:
    May 22nd, 2008 at 9:50 pm
    Hey thanks I’ve been looking for this plugin for a while now(WWSGD), I’ve tried the subscribe remind plugin and if you hack the code on that one you can replace the text with an image. I was wondering is this possible with the “what Seth Godin would do” plugin?
  121. Richard K Miller Says:
    May 22nd, 2008 at 10:50 pm
    Luis: You should be able to include any HTML code in the text box of this plugin, including an image. Is that what you mean?
  122. Barbara Ling Says:
    May 24th, 2008 at 3:42 am
    Morning!

    Excellent wonderful plugin, thanks so much for making it!

    Question – do you know of anything similar that might work for blogs at eBay?

    Thanks!

    barbara

  123. Mike at PaceButler Recycling Says:
    May 25th, 2008 at 6:45 am
    Read about this plugin in the “Authority Black Book” and I think it’s a great idea. We’re installing this in our new blog. Thanks.
  124. jocuri Says:
    May 27th, 2008 at 12:30 pm
    Thank you
  125. Maria Says:
    May 28th, 2008 at 12:43 pm
    I’m satisfied with its performance, especially when it helped tracking new and returning visitors to my blog. Thanks
  126. Jorge Says:
    May 31st, 2008 at 3:20 pm
    Can’t control the plugin from admin WP panel. The content of “message to new visitors” field disappears and becames the “repetition” number. Ex: I write “Welcome….” with 3 in “repetition” and save, then “Welcome…” is replaced by “3″.
    I’ve tried to insert the message a lot of times, but still doesn’t work.
    What can I do?
    Thanks.
  127. Richard K Miller Says:
    June 10th, 2008 at 9:42 pm
    Barbara Ling: I’m not sure if eBay blogs support plugins! If you find anything that works, let me know.

    Jorge: Please download the latest version of this plugin (version 1.5, updated tonight) and try the “Reset Settings” button. This may clear up the issue you’re having.

  128. Jorge Says:
    June 12th, 2008 at 2:13 pm
    @Richard: Thanks. Great job! Now it’s working. I let you know if I find any issue. ;)
  129. V Says:
    June 14th, 2008 at 6:23 am
    Would try soon. Seems good.