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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 the what-would-seth_godin-do folder to your WordPress plugins folder.
  3. Activate the plugin in the Plugins panel.
  4. Customize settings in the Settings panel.

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. Your visitor must have cookies enabled.

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

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

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

378 replies on “WordPress plugin: What Would Seth Godin Do”

I have seen some people using this plug in who had a background color and a link in the text. I did not see any area for me to customize those settings. How do I add a clickable link and background color to make the box stand out more?

Hello Richard,
My client is using this plugin, and it is generating several notices in the debug.log. Is the plugin on github? If so, I can submit some fixes to address those issues. If not, how should I go about it?

Richard, on my homepage, I’ve got summaries of my posts. Unfortunately, the my summaries begin with the text of the “What Would Seth Godin Do” plugin.
Have you ever heard about this problem, and if yes, what can I do ?
Thanks a lot
Christophe

I installed the plugin and it’s set it self up at the top of the post’s which is great … but I don’t get a (settings) option in the plugins area of my blog?

Is there any precedent of this plugin just not working? I can’t seem to see anything on any browser to suggest it is there at all – am I doing something wrong?

Using mystique theme on standard wordpress site with the plugin set to show on posts and pages. It’s a great idea so I’m hoping I can get it working!

Thanks,
Alex.

Richard, love this plugin!

Quick question: With the welcome button destination url, can I use any short-codes or call to actions? Looking to have a subscribe box or similar popup.

Thanks,
Gareth

Silly question – but how can I ensure this plugin is working? I can’t see it on my end because I’ve obviously been to my own site many, many times. When I increase the “# of repetitions” to an ungodly high number, it still doesn’t come up. I’d like to know how it is looking to a new user. Can you help me out?

Thanks so much!

View your website in incognito mode. If you are using google chrome, just hold down the control ke and the shift key whilst you press the letter N. It will open up a new window.

Richard, thank you so much! It is now installed, and when I launch my blog on January 2, I expect people to subscribe. That leads me to 2 more questions:
1. Is subscribing an automatic function or am I supposed to install another plugin?

2. Will I know they have subscribed? How?

1. No more plugins needed, but that’ll be up to your users to subscribe using Google Reader or NetNewsWire or some other app.

2. You can install Google FeedBurner and the FeedBurner WordPress plugin to get stats on your subscribers.

By Post Author

Hi Richard! I activated the plugin and adjusted the settings to what I desired and it is not working on my site. My site’s theme is thesis. Does this plugin work with thesis?

Hi Richard,
The plugin is not performing properly for me and I wish to see if this is due to my error or did something went wrong in updating the plugin.
I use thesis 1.85, disabled all the other plugins I had on the blog, but still, I have the frame appear only on the home page, and not on posts.
I see the same effect on your blog as well – on the inner posts it won’t show (and they are the posts visitors are coming to from the search engines)
I have tried playing with before and after post options, posts and pages etc – nothing seems to be helping…
Anyone else has this issue?
Thanks for a quick response.
Dany

Hi Richard!

I’ve been testing the plugin and really like it! Version 2.0 is not being indexed… is there any way to make turn that off, or modify the code so it IS being indexed?

Hi Howard, did you ever get to add the code to the comment?? The plugin is not working for me either, and I’ve tried adding the code that’s mentioned in the plugin config page, to no avail.
Anyone else had a non-appearing message?

Thanks,
Luke

Hi Richard, love the concept of the plugin, but I can not get it to show up on my site? I have two messages for new visitors and return visitors, but neither show up? Is here the right place to post support questions? Should it work on any theme? Is there a trouble-shooting process to follow? I tried resetting, but still didn’t work. WP 3.3.1 using the Magazinum theme from WPZoom. Thanks.

I haven’t check that. I ended up adding the following code to the single.php file just below the author meta:

Then added some css to style the div. Works like a treat and I can now style it as I wish! Thanks. 😉

Hey Richard, I love the WWSGD plugin. THANK YOU! Can you help me with one thing I want to do differently? I’d like the WWSGD box to only show below a full post entry and not on my /blog (teaser entries) page. Can that be done? Thanks for your time/help!

Hi Richard, I don´t use it before. I use the arras theme. Will try it with another theme. I see that there is no an upgradr for WP 3.3.1… Thanks

Hey Richard, great plugin. I just added it into my site and although it appears, I’m getting an error message in the settings section:

Fatal error: Call to undefined function esc_textarea() in /home/ryan/public_html/wp-content/plugins/what-would-seth-godin-do/what_would_seth_godin_do.php on line 81

thoughts?

There are no settings in the plugin just activate/deactivate and edit . I can not change the lifespan. I want to keep it on the page always but now it is gone.

Thanks for the plugin… had to search through your comments to discover the Settings for it were under WWSGD… was not obvious when i first looked, thanks.

I like the idea of this plug-in and use it but an editor caught a missing word for returning visitors: (copied from my site) note “here” is missing:

Since you have been before you might want to subscribe to my mailing list so we can keep in touch. Thanks for visiting!

I looked for it in the html editor but could not determine where to add the missing “here”? Please advise, thanks, Lawrey

Ed,

Anyway to get this feature on selected pages only? Its appearing all over my site and I had to remove it. I’d like it only to appear on certain pages. Also, if I decide to use it again I need to change the URL for the feed. Can you tell me how to do this? Right now it says home then /feed and I use Feedburner.

Thanks!

I like WWSGD a lot. Thanks
I’m validating my code at validator.w3.org and am getting this warning:
Line 509, Column 20: character “<" is the first character of a delimiter but occurred as data
if ( count <= 5 ) {

That code is in the following WWSGD-related lines:
else {
count = parseInt(jQuery.cookie('wwsgd_visits'), 10) + 1;
}
jQuery.cookie('wwsgd_visits', count, { expires: 365, path: "/" });
if ( count <= 5 ) {
jQuery(".wwsgd").show();
}
—
Is there a coding change that needs to be made? If so, where would I make the edit?
Thanks, Ed

I too would like to at the very least be able to limit this so that it only appears on the entry page and not during the entire visit. At least for the return message as the first visit one is limited anyways. Any ideas?

I see everyone can’t get the newer version of the plugin to work. I don’t know what was updated or changed in the new version but I do know that version 2.7 works just fine. I have tried to update to the newer version and it hasn’t worked and that’s why I reverted back to the older version. Maybe knowing this will help a few people keep things going until the new version of the plugin can be corrected.

Excellent post. I was checking constantly this blog and I’m inspired! Extremely useful information specifically the last part 🙂 I care for such information a lot. I used to be seeking this certain info for a long time. Thanks and good luck.

Hi, sorry it appears that in my previous message the code segment didn’t show. Anyway in the source, it appears that my custom message was wrapped in a div like, <div style=”display:none”&rt;

Thanks in advance for your help.

Hi,

Strangely the plugin doesn’t work, even after I logged out of admin and even when I put the in my template. When I view the source, it appears the code was hidden with css:

My custom message etc

Any idea what’s happening here? Thanks.

For various reasons I intend to blog in my native language (Italian).
My question:

is the “sethgodin” plug in available in Italian?

Thanks.
Dan

Great concept and plugin. Only issue i’ve had is that when my site is googled, or certain articles of it are googled, the blurb in google shows up as my wwsgd come sign up text – rather than the meta description or snippet of the article…. i’ve since switched to placing the wwsgd bit below the post content, but i’d rather have it on top for first time visitors.

Hi Richard,

I goofed! I tried to alter your php file and now I cann fix it nor no matter how many times I delete and add the plugin bck, WP (or the plugin?? not sure) still says there is an error. Can you please help and tell me how to totally clear this error and get a fresh install of the plugin?

Thanks Richard,

Here is the error message (sorry I did not include this at first):

br />
Fatal error: Call to undefined function esc_textarea() in /home/tina2010/public_html/wp-content/plugins/what-would-seth-godin-do/what_would_seth_godin_do.php on line 81

And I have deleted it via the admin panel and ftp and still get the same thing.

Any help is appreciated! I was trying to style it if possible too.

Thanks,

Tina

I have a dumb newbie question. This plug in sounds terrific, but when I activate it, it doesn’t offer an settings option, and I’d really like to add a bit about email alerts, and maybe have it run at the bottom. Am I doing something wrong?

Hi,

I just recently upgraded to the latest WP version and I really would like to use your plugin but it isn’t showing up on my existing blog posts. I have a bunch of plug-ins installed but I do not see any of them interfering with yours.

Can you have a look and see what the problem is? I’ve tried uninstalling and reinstalling it but to no avail, and I’ve used the most recent version of WWSGD.

Thank you!

Hi Richard,

I see you’re pretty good about responding to people here, which is pretty incredible given how popular this plugin is.

I’m having trouble implementing it on my site (http://utahcommonvalues.org). It’s properly installed, as far as I can tell, but I can’t get the message to appear.

Here are some details:
– I have Super Cache, and I’ve tried it with and with out caching activated.
– I’ve tried on a few computers.
– I’ve tried putting it before, after, and only where I have the code inserted, but none of the options work for me.

If you have any suggestions for me, I’d be quite grateful!

Hi Richard! my website is http://www.heatherthorkelson.com and yes, the plugin is currently active on posts only. however i should mention that since i last posted, i reinstalled the theme i am using on wordpress entirely and rebuilt my site. when it was freshly installed, and not a single plugin activated, i was still getting the ORIGINAL text that i had written into the plugin ages ago coming up any time i try to post a link to my site. very very frustrating! it’s stuck in the system somewhere. i only just re-added the WWSGD plugin this morning, and i’m still having the exact same problem. i thought maybe reactivating it in my fresh site would bump out the old text, but no dice. please help!! where can i go to delete this? i need my meta description representing my site!

thanks a million (in advance) ~ H

Two WP updates ago it seemed to stop working in Firefox but still worked in IE and Chrome. Now with the last update I notice it has stopped working in those two as well. 🙁

Thanks. I just checked the Write Prompts link and it is not working. I did the update. I did the “reset” that I found in the settings and still doesn’t appear to work. I viewed it in firefox, ie, and chrome.
I also did the updates and checks on the plusshe blog too and it is still not working.
It is so weird. They were working fine for the longest time.

Today I thought maybe it is another plugin interfering so I deactivate all the plugins except WWSGD and it still didn’t work.
My next thought would be something in the theme but they are different themes for each blog so that seems unlikely.

hey richard,

love the plugin but it seems that the text from the widget has overriden my meta-description. so when i go to post a link to my site on FB for example, the description next to my thumbnail is the text from the WWSGD widget. NOT GOOD. this is confusing for people! i tried a number of things, and then eventually just deactivated the widget entirely. i also emptied my cache and history, but this same WWSGD text STILL shows up any time i try to post a link to my site anywhere. HELP! this is causing massive problems. someone said i’d need to go into the source code to figure out where the problem was, but i’m not sure where to look. i have a wordpress.org site. any help would be extremely appreciated, as i DO want to use this widget eventually ~ harmoniously…! thanks.

Hi
I’ve just started putting a web blog together and added your plugin but mine also isn’t working? Just wanted to let you know.

Hi Paul, if you have WordPress installed in a separate location from your site, WWSGD may have been broken because of that. I just checked in WWSGD 2.0.2 which fixes this. Look for it shortly in your plugin updates. If that doesn’t fix it for you, let me know.

By Post Author

Hello I Just upgraded to 2.0.1, pasted in my welcome message and links and now the whole welcome box has disappeared. It’s like the plugin isn’t even there. I tried uninstalling and re installing the plugin, still nothing is showing up. Did I break it? Any idea why this might be? Thanks! D

Dustin, I just completed WWSGD 2.0.2 which fixes an issue with non-standard WordPress installations (users who keep a separate site address and WordPress address.) You should see this appear in your plugin updates in the next few hours. Let me know if it still doesn’t work afterwards.

By Post Author

Richard,
I came across a post of yours in the Warrior Forum today when I was looking for some WordPress information. I got here by following one of the links in that post (actually I created a PDF of that post since it seems that one of your other posts has gone MIA on the warrior forum. I PMd Chris for a copy of the PDF in hopes that he still has it. You give some fabulous tips for using WordPress as a “squeeze machine”. I have had several visitors to my site, but only one left a comment and no one has signed up to my list. I am going to take the approach you suggested – leave a comment and get your free copy of .

Love your plugin but have one question about the option to exclude certain pages/posts. What format do I need to enter for it to work? I’ve tried post title, direct url and slug but no luck.

Any tips would be much appreciated!

Perfect – works like a charm – thank you for the tip.

Perhaps in your next release, you can add some instructions to the ReadMe file.

I do not understand what the reason is, but this is not working for me.
In the settings area, I have it so the message locations is placed only where I use the template tag.
The Show Message on Pages? On Posts and Pages
Posts/Pages to Exclude and then I include the numbers.
It’s not working.
Am I doing something wrong that is not obvious to an amateur?

Thanks,
Erin

I’m having trouble too. I created a landing page that I don’t want the message to show up on. It’s the only ID in the exclusion list. When checking it in Safari and Firefox on a Mac, I still see the message. I’m using WP 3.2.1 with v2.0.3 of the plugin.

Any ideas?

Thanks! Great plugin.
-j

Two questions for you:

First, I noticed that two people had problems with WP Super Cache activated. Are there issues for sites using Super Cache, or have they been resolved?

Secondly, can you code it so that it cancels further new visitor messages when a new visitor clicks on the RSS feed link in the plugin display box? That way when readers take the action that you want them to take, they are no longer asked to do so. The limit of how many times the box is shown should only be applied to those that have not yet signed up. I think it is a nuisance to readers that do sign up, to still see the new visitor message perhaps 3 times again.

I think this plugin is extremely useful; I have installed it, and I thank you for developing it. A few tweaks here and there as time allows, and it can be great 🙂

John

Hey John, I’m working on WWSGD 2.0 which will work with Super Cache and will also give you the option to cancel the message as soon as the visitor visits a certain page. Should be done in a couple of weeks.

By Post Author

Hi Richard,

Why don’t you think about showing a thank you message for visitor coming back for at least 5 times.

Actually, couldn’t we just deliver the message by default, though make it hidden, then using javascript, check the cookie on the client side to see whether to show the message or not? That might work.

Richard, I coded it up. Here’s the updated code http://goo.gl/nJeUO

I also added the ability for the user to “hide” the intro message before the number of repetitions expire. You can see this at work in the default message. Right now, when you set the plugin to check the cookie on the browser, the Message to Return Visitors doesn’t work so I’ve commented that out for now. I don’t use it on my installations. I have this live right now on gothamschools.org. Note that I had to add the jquery.cookie.js file to the plugin.

Let me know if you want all of this in a different form. Maybe I’ll write up a short blog post about it on my blog.

Wow, thanks for doing this Chris. I’ll be glad to roll it back into the code. I haven’t even looked at it yet. I’m moving to Boulder, CO in 10 days so I’m busy with those preparations, but as soon as I get a free moment I’ll get this tested and integrated, with kudos to you. Thanks for doing that.

By Post Author

Chris, I’ve incorporated your patch into the plugin, available in trunk though not yet formally released. I took out the option to choose between server-side cookies and client-side cookies and just went with client-side cookies. Feel free to test it out here: http://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/what-would-seth-godin-do/trunk/

I’m going to add a couple more things and then release this as WWSGD 2.0. I’ll include a shoutout to you in the release notes. Thanks again for the code.

By Post Author

Hey Richard,
This is probably a newby question, but how do you add a hyperlink in the feed?
The code on install is
If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!”,
Was just hoping you could give an example on how to add a link to another page in place of the rss feed.
Cheers,

Hi Richard,

I’ve installed your plugin on my blog and now I am wondering if the caching plugin I use does interfere with WWSGD ? At least the box does not disappear after 5 visits of the page. It seems like the cached results depend on the users who went there in the first place: either the WWSGD box is cached or not depending on there status of being newbies or returning visitors. DO you have any idea to work around this issue?

Henning

Richard –

Great plugin, I’m finding that for some reason it is displaying the text of my message properly to new and returning visitors on all my posts.

However, on the *first* post of my homepage (my homepage has the first 10 posts, shortened with “continue” button) it has the text of my WWSGD plugin as part of the excerpt.

I did some searching, and saw some people are having the same problem on the WordPress support forums but I can’t find a response.

Do I just have the settings wrong somehow? Thanks!

Hey John, unfortunately that’s the current behavior of the plugin. It shows the message on the first available “content”, which happens to be the first of your 10 posts for you. What WWSGD needs is the option to place the message at an arbitrary location, a feature planned for future development.

By Post Author

Ah, gotcha. Well at least it doesn’t show up in the RSS feed.

Still looks a little weird in the excerpt on the homepage, the only real fear is that it may affect clickthrough.

Perhaps a quicker feature to implement might be an option to turn it off on the homepage or in excerpts.

Anyway thanks for the response. It is still a highly useful plugin.

I have a frame on my bloggsite with this text:If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting! So far so good. But when people clik on the link RSS feed this message pops up:
“This page contains the following errors:

error on line 3 at column 486: Extra content at the end of the document
Below is a rendering of the page up to the first error.”

I have installed your plugin sucessfully so….do you have any ide what I have done wrong and where I can do changes?

@Kristinoy, what browser are you using? It sounds like the error may not be related to the plugin but related to clicking on an RSS link. If your browser isn’t setup to handle RSS feeds, it may return an error like that.

By Post Author

Hi Richard,
This is a great plug-in.

I’m using the plug-in to show a sales page for a product at the top of all posts and pages.

Is there any way to have the WWSGD box show above the posts/pages headline?

I am using Thesis as the theme.

Thanks for any direction.

John

Richard,

Really great plugin! I am having a bit of trouble with it though. I am using a fairly modern WP (3.01) with thesis 1.8 as my theme. I am having some inconsistent results with the way that the box appears. I have the same code in the before/after, and the default of 5 visits. When I load up the site, the box appears. However, when I click into any post, it does not appear. Do I have something set wonky? Thanks!

-Ché

Hi Richard,

I installed your plugin in my site and provided a first message but it appears on the main blog page only. If I click on any post to visualize it separately…No message! This is also true if I load a post directly. I’ve also tried to put a higher number on the visits and to tick “posts and pages”…
I’m using Thesis 1.7
Any hints on where the problem may be?

Thank you in advance,
— Janet

Richard,
great plugin! thanks for sharing!!
(and a special thanks for replying to all the comments you get.)
one quick question. is there a way to show the message for new visitors before the post but the message for returning visitors after the post?
greetings from Guatemala.

Thanks for doing this for us, I have a small tiny request though. I’m tryign to implement this on my website, and the welcome message is used to direct the view to a sales page on the website.. However the WWSGD message still appears on the sales page, which looks weird.. Is there any way to specif what pages the welcome message appears on?

The sales landing page is on one of the “pages” of the wordpress blog. I’d like the WWSGD to still appear on the blog posts, homepage, search page, tag pages, catogiries pages etc.

Great plugin!
Would it be possible to activate the cookie only when a user visits a specific page on your blog/site, so that after visiting that page the welcome message would disappear?
I’ve been looking for a plugin that does this and yours is the one that came the closest.
I’m currently using the plugin with wordpress.

Thanks,
Max

Hi Richard,
i love love this creation of yours.
I have installed this plugin to my as yet unlaunched self hosted WP Blog
see link above
my groovy IT son tested it for but the RSS goes nowhere.
I sent him your code, he said yep mum it’s all there and added…
‘its what’s in the /blog/feed folder that is missing’.
can you guide me as to what I need to do?
Mostly I learn all these things my self but son is my backup.
(a friend has same onhers and it goes nowhere also. she is also on WP)
I have several 4 Richards in my life and they are all cool guys,

@TC Nielson: Does the big empty box disappear after 5 visits? You might try pasting the HTML you’ve used for your box into its own post, simply to test that it works as you expect.

By Post Author

Hi Richard,

I’ve seen this great plugin on Katie Freiling’s website and many others – and it shows on the blog posts in the top right side of posts.

However when it’s on a site I’m working on, it shows as a wide bar across the top of pages (about page).

Please could you let me know how to create a smaller more square box like Katie’s site? It’s not obvious from the plugin customisation area, nor from the comments I’ve read on this website.

Many thanks
Tracey

Hi Richard.
I liked the idea of the plugin and have installed it.
I wanted it to show in every post but not on the other pages.
I have defined the home page as a landing page for an optin, and the blog posts I have defined to be shown on a blog page.
I have defined in the plugin setup that the iframe will show only on posts.
I find it though, only on the blog page, but not in each individual post.
How can I define it to appear in each post, except for doing what I did?
Thanks for your help

As it only works five times, a simple trick I used is to good your site and view the cache to see the plugin in action . Try it!

I’m having just the opposite problem that some are having. The Box shows up on the main index page, but not on the individual posts. I have been fighting with this for 2 days. When I add the template tag to the posts, all I get is a big empty box. I am using the Thesis theme.

Any ideas?

Hi Richard I wonder if you could help me?

I’ve installed your wwsgd plugin, unfortunately it displays on all pages no matter what settings I choose with the message “you’ve visited a few times and I would appreciate your thoughts on this post, why not comment?”.

This would be great, however I never wrote this message, I left it blank in the options page!! It appears after 4 visits (refreshes). I’ve tried resetting, no good, cleared cache, uninstalled, wiped line form sql database, no idea where it is coming from. If I try to reinstall it posts both the welcome message and the leave a comment message making a real mess!
Any help at this stage would be gladly appreciated….

Richard – I have found an easy work-around for my suggestion. This will only work when you don’t use the “message to returning visitors”. I simply added the query marked with ***** to your code (near the bottom of the file):

function wwsgd_get_the_message()
{
global $wwsgd_visits, $wwsgd_settings;

********************

if ($wwsgd_visits <= 1 == $wwsgd_settings['repetition'])
{
return $wwsgd_settings['return_visitor_message'];
}
else

********************

if ($wwsgd_visits <= $wwsgd_settings['repetition'] || 0 == $wwsgd_settings['repetition'])
{
return $wwsgd_settings['new_visitor_message'];
}
else
{
return $wwsgd_settings['return_visitor_message'];
}
}

Thank you Richard for your answer.
Are you still updating your great plugin so that there is any chance that this feature might be added?
Or do you think I could do this by modifying the php-file? (I have almost no programming background)

As a blog reader, I find these kind of messages really annoying.
When I see these messages, I will actually stop from subscribing to the RSS, simply as I feel I am getting pressured into it.

@Miklas, thanks for the tip.

@William, at the moment there are not multiple tiers, but that is indeed an interesting idea.

@Jim, there’s currently no way to exclude the plugin on specific pages, but I daresay that is the most request feature. Coming soon.

@Doc, does the plugin work correctly with other themes?

By Post Author

Richard, your plugin is really great. I’m using it on my website without any problems.
One thing I noted is that unfortunately Google often takes the text from the WWSGD notification as a snippet in the SERPs. This is not really great news, as the first thing the reader gets to know about my site in Google is something like “Thank you for visiting. Please subscribe to our newsletter…”

Would it be possible to add an option to WWSGD which would disable showing the message on the very first visit? This would remove the problem, and any visitor looking at more than one page would still get to see the message…

Hi, I saw this question a couple of times now but with no reply. Is it possible to dissable the box from showing on just a single page? I would like to keep it up on all of my posts and pages except my contact page. I was looking into adding a custom word press field to disable similar to adding the custom field name=”tweetmeme” value=”false” to turn that plugin off on individual pages but to no avail with wwsgd.

Thank you in advance for any help.

Is it possible for one to alter the code to include more messages? For example: 1 message when a user visits 5 times, another with 10 times, another with 100 times and so on?

Great plugin. One slight fault, the return visitors message doesn’t show live links on the category or search excerpts pages. I use the Atahualpa Theme by BytesForAll, whether that affects it I don’t know.

For me, it could either be fixed or just have a button to not let the message show on category and search result pages.

Cheers,
Doc.

FYI: I had to uninstall the plugin because the rss feed is not correct and shows as a broken link on the feed — we are running wordpress 2.9.2, is it working for anyone else? We also have wishlist member installed, if that might be causing a conflict?

Hoping we can get this worked out so we can use this plugin, its a great idea and does just what we are looking, so once we can get the custom message to show, I can reinstall it! Looking forward to your help.

I am trying to customize the rss feed message that displays using the options as Melissa says above, but the new message changes are not showing up – it still shows the default message – and the rss feed link that shows by default is not correct – it shows the update message in the admin but the actual site pages do not reflect the changes – help!

Anyone else having this problem, I tried downloading the patch that was referenced, but that is a broken line – how do we get it to work?

http://www.nextforsmallbusiness.com/2009/12/30/tips-for-creating-powerful-headlines-that-sell/

Hi Richard. Thanks for this great plugin. My theme is not designed work with this nice plugin. I’ll have to add some code manually to set the message above the post/page. Can you please give me some ideas of what I should drop where? TXS
Johan

How can I disable WWSG Message on specific pages? I have seen that I can input the tag where I want it to display. But this is very hard work.

Bye
Horst

I can’t get the feed url changes to stick – I’ve tried the following with no luck!

new_visitor_message’ => “If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!”

thanks for your help

Surprised that no one here mentioned this idea. I checked through WordPress and didn’t see any function like it, and this plugin was so close that I figured I’d mod it for my needs.

Basically created a is_return_user() function. Now, based on the logic in this, I can do anything I want in any template or plugin conditionally based on the is_return_user() function, which is phenomenally useful. For example, I have a home page for a client that has a pre-loader the first time you go to it…which is great, because content is pre-loading…but I don’t want every page to pre-load, nor do I want someone who has already visited the home page a few times to have to sit through it when it’s already loaded! A simple if(!is_return_user() && (is_home() || is_front_page())) and it works perfectly!

Thanks for the great work on this.

@Niman: If you’re putting your PHP code (the rand() stuff) in the WWSGD message, that’s why it’s not working. The WWSGD message box doesn’t execute any PHP. Not sure if we’d want to go that route for security reasons. Perhaps there’s a workaround of some sort. Let me know if you find anything.

By Post Author

Hi Richard,

Great Plugin! We’re using it to show a cartoon image to visitors the first 5 times they come to our site. Currently, it is using this image: http://www.trexglobal.com/images/cartoons/cartoons_3.gif

I have 5 images, cartoon_1.gif, cartoon_2.gif, etc….

I know that using the following code, I should be able to randomize the number in the image URL, but I just can’t get it to work. I have tried using different variations of code, all not working:

<img src=http://www.trexglobal.com/images/cartoons/cartoons_.gif/>
<img src="http://www.trexglobal.com/images/cartoons/cartoons_.gif“>
<img src="http://www.trexglobal.com/images/cartoons/cartoons_.gif“>

Any thoughts on why I can’t get it to work?

Works like a charm. Thank you so much. I have another question though. I would like to use it with qtranslate to translate the text, but widgets strip out any php. Any ideas?

The code used to hardcode output in different languages is:


<?php _e(" english text danish text "); ?>

@brainsolid, @Miklas, @Greg Turner: The latest version of WWSGD (v. 1.7) offers a template tag that you can use to position the message in any section of your template:

< ?php wwsgd_the_message(); ?>

By Post Author

Great plugin. I use it to play a audio recording when someone visits for the first time. Suggestion for improvement: I would like finer distinctions on where it appears. Such as I would like to be able to designate that it only appears on the home page.

Hi Richard,

Is there a way to adjust the plugin to display the message above the post title? Mine is displaying below it. Is it an easy PHP tweak?

Thanks!

I have a strange bug in my theme because I’ve hacked it so much and I can’t figure out where it goes wrong. So instead of fixing that…. 🙂 is there a way to call the plugin directly, so I can place it where i want?

Hey, excellent idea for a plugin. I hope you get the javascript version implemented soon, as I wish to use this plugin with the Super Cache plugin as well. Also, just thought you should know that in the wordpress.com plugin directory, your plugin is still listed as compatible up to version 2.6.3 of wordpress (which is what brought me here, to read what people were saying about it and 2.7). I intend on tracking the progress of this plugin and I look forward to your next update. Thanks,

Steve

Hello Richard, nice to know you.

I like the idea, and thanks to you for convert it becomes a plug in.
I will try in for my family blog soon.

I love this plugin, but I also love WP Super Cache, and the 2 are incompatible due to the way WP Super Cache stores rendered pages as HTML.

Are you planning to convert the plugin to use javascript to load the message any time soon? That will then make the plugin cache friendly.

Thanks
Dan

@Dan @ PowerDosh.com: Great idea. Converting to JavaScript would also solve the problem with search engine spiders saving the welcome messages. I’ll put this on deck for development.

By Post Author

I’ve got a feature request – not a huge one, I hope.

Multiple levels of returning visitors, and recognizing the difference between visitors and registered users.

I think that’s exactly What Seth Would Do.

You’ve got New Visitors (“Hi! Subscribe to my RSS Feed”), n00b returners (“Welcome back! Why not register and participate?”) , Long time visitors (“Welcome back! Check out our other site/forums/whatever ~link~”) and Registered Users (“Wassup! Have you ever noticed that unregistered users to this site smell a little… funny?”).

I installed for wp 2.7 and it works, but Edit takes me to the php code, not any sort of settings. Is that the way it is? I’m not that up on php yet…

I would like to move the box to the bottom of my posts.

@Simrat: You shouldn’t necessarily need to edit the plugin code but edit the plugin settings, which are under the Settings menu. Have you used the WWSGD plugin prior to WP version 2.7?

By Post Author

Hi,

I have installed this plugin in wordpress 2.7 but i am not able to see the message box after or before is there any know bug or how to fix this problem.

Thanks richard

Hi,

I saw the list of Plugins that work in Version 2.7
and I did not see this plugin .

Are there any updates and information?

Please add your Plugin’s status to this page
ASAP to help other fans of your Plugin.

Thanks.

Farid

This is the exact thing I was looking.
I have seen this plugin (probably) in action in many blogs, but could not know what it was.
I thought there was something very technical. Indeed it is, but you made it insanely simple thanks a lot.
Dr Bikash

This is the exact thong I was looking.
I have seen this plugin (probably) in action in many blogs, but could not know what it was.
I thought there was something very technical. Indeed it is, but you made it insanely simple thanks a lot.
Dr Bikash

Charles Stricklin: I’ve added a Changelog to the source repository, which you can find here:

http://svn.wp-plugins.org/what-would-seth-godin-do/trunk/changelog.txt

Pete: I like your idea for “homecoming visitors.” I’ll have to incubate that idea a bit. WWSGD doesn’t currently have any sense of time — it simply gives a message for the first 5 visits — so making a message appear after 30 days wouldn’t be a simple tack-on of code. Let me think about that.

Nathan Bingham: Good point. In a future version (hopefully sooner rather than later) I’ll add the option to exclude the message from excerpts.

Andy Mobbs: I’ve never thought of or heard anyone suggest a different message for each category. Let me sit on that a little while and see what sort of interest there is for it.

Jeff@MySuperChargedLife: I’ve just updated the plugin to version 1.6, which allows you to exclude the message from Pages, while keeping it on Posts.

Carol: It sounds like you have two versions of the plugin in your plugins folder. You should probably delete plugins/ what_would_seth_godin_do.php and keep plugins/ what_would_seth_godin_do/ what_would_seth_godin_do.php.

By Post Author

When I try to activate the latest version (1.5) this is the message I get:

Fatal error: Cannot redeclare wwsgd_options_subpanel() (previously declared in /home/ipenwil9/public_html/wp-content/plugins/what-would-seth-godin-do/what_would_seth_godin_do.php:48) in /home/ipenwil9/public_html/wp-content/plugins/what_would_seth_godin_do.php on line 69

I see other’s have asked about this, but is there a way to keep the messages from showing up on the static pages on my site? I’d prefer that it just appear on my articles and not on the static pages.

Great plug-in! I’ve been using it for awhile and it has definitely helped me to build subscribers.

Hi,

I really like the plugin. I was just wondering if it would be possible to make so that I could show a different message depending on which category of blog the post was in.

For example if my blog was on triathlon, and i had 3 categories, swmming, cycling and running I could add a different message to each of these categories?

Excellent plugin!

My only problem is that if you use the_excerpt() then it displays the WWSGD message? Is it possible to only have the WWSGD message prefaced when the whole post is called from the database and not an excerpt?

I presently have the message displayed at the bottom of the post to prevent this, but for bounce-throughs a message at the top is more helpful.

Any thoughts / suggestions?

Richard, I’d like to enter it myself, thank you, in the admin panel. I have many possibilities: (1) link to or opine on the hot topic of the moment, (2) announce new site features (3) name and welcome new community members (4) a weekly freebie or contest (5) link to a Best of This Week roundup post (6) link to a changelog. — Anything to get the returning visitor back on track with the blog’s happenings.

It also takes up not much more extra code than what the “returning visitors” text feature put in. No bloat.

It’s a WWSGD 2 🙂 since it treats new visitors, old-timers and homecoming visitors differently.

Charles: I’m afraid I don’t have a formal change log yet, but I can tell you that version 1.5 includes a new “message for returning visitors” as well as a security update to uses WordPress “nonces”.

By Post Author

Pete: I think you’re right about the “returning visitors” text being less valuable than the “new visitors” text. But the option’s there for those who want it.

I’m planning to include the “hide from SE bots” functionality shortly.

If a feature were added to show “what’s new in the last month,” for example, do you envision the plugin automatically showing what’s new, or your having to enter it yourself? Good idea.

By Post Author

Sorry I don’t see the point of the “returning visitors” text. I don’t know why I would need to nag constantly those who visited my blog more than 5 times.

I’d like to say, +1 to the “hide from SE bots” suggestion. FYI, Dave Bradley Science’s idea is provided by The undersigned’s Landing Sites plugin.

What would be more useful is a thrice-appearing “Welcome back, here’s what’s new:” message to surfers who visit again after over X number of days. For example, set X=30, then set message to “Here’s what’s new to BlogBlog this month.”

Stefanie, I’m sorry to hear you’re still having difficulty. I’m not sure how to replicate the problem you’re having since on my own blog I’m able to activate both WWSGD and HeadSpace2 (which I’ve never used before.) Do you have another WordPress blog on which you could install both plugins and test?

By Post Author

I’ve thought about adding a feature to give a message based on search engine referers, but I likewise didn’t know if it should be part of this plugin or a separate one. Any thoughts? (Or does anybody else have any thoughts?)

Hey Richard,
Just scrolled down and noticed Dan’s comment too. I have been aware of your plugin for well over a year, but I’ve just spent the past 10 minutes searching for a plugin which would address visitors from Google, but unsuccessfully (so I came to what I know 🙂 )

I think it would be wise to integrate it into this plugin, so that you don’t have two welcome notes popping up for search visitors. Instead, this plugin would determine if the visitor was coming directly from Google, and you could say, “Hey Googler. You’ve found……but there are heaps of other cool articles here and subscriptions are free…” or something like that.

Dan Nedelko: I’ve thought about adding a feature to give a message based on search engine referers, but I likewise didn’t know if it should be part of this plugin or a separate one. Any thoughts? (Or does anybody else have any thoughts?)

By Post Author

Wow, im 555 commentator! Thats a great plugin and im sure visitors appreciate that neat box when they first visit a blog. And we (blog owners) appreciate more subscribed RSS users, more Twitter followers etc.
Thanks for the plugin.

Great plugin, I love it and I integrated it into my blog immediately upon running into it.

As I’m a developer I would like to putch in if that’s cool and add search referrer login to it. As an example:

“Thanks for coming to the site, here’s what we have for your Google search on wordpress plugins”

Where wordpress plugins would be search term and Google would be the engine referrer.

Anyone have any thoughts on this? Input? Does it even belong as an added feature in this plugin or would it be more appropriate in a separate plugin?

Looking forward to hearing back from everyone.

Cheers,
Dan Nedelko

Посоветовали вашу статью. Не зря. Приглянулось. Буду постоянным посетителем и подпишусь на RSS

Stefanie: Sorry, somehow you previous message slipped by. I installed and activated HeadSpace2 and didn’t see any trouble with the WWSGD plugin. Do I need to do any special to get them to conflict?

ooh, several days ago i wonder why many blog have the same phrase “If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe ….”

and guess…. I found the answer here haha
thanks 😀

Hi Richard, this is a neat plugin. Just one thing: it shows up under the excerpt of my most recent blog post, and I don’t want it to do that. I only want it to show up under the full posts (in single.php), not the excerpts on the blog index page (in blog-index.php).

I read an earlier comment from last year from another user who requested the ability to have the messages show only on the full blog posts, and you replied that you would include this in a future upgrade. Did this happen?

Is there any way to make this play nice with Headspace2? That plugin has a similar feature, but it will not work for me, and I like the options of WWSGD better. If I keep Headspace running, WWSGD does not show the message, but I don’t want to delete Headspace because I am using it for many of its other features.

How would I modify the plugin so that it shows not at the top of my first post but right above my posts, beneath my Page list. For example, on my site I would like it to show up between “Home, About, Rise of the Runelords Campaign” and the first post. Thoughts?

Thank you for this plugin in. I hope this will help us to keep and retain our visitors and not annoy them.’

I’m going to test and see if it will help me increase my subscription list. Thank you again

Hi there,
Know anyone which plugin to use if I want only a part of the article to be displayed? If someone want to read more there will be a “read more” link…
On my blog right now is displayed all of article content and I don’t want this…
I’m talking about the latest 10 articles displayed on the first page of my blog.
I’m using WordPress.
Can anyone help?

Thank you for this usefull plugin,
but a better iprovement would be the if it understand the differnce from visitors to serch engine bots so they don’t index the message for new visitors.

thank you

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.

By Post Author

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.

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

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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);

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.

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

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.

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?

By Post Author

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!

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?

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.

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!

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)

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.

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?

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?

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

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!

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.

By Post Author

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

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 🙂

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.

By Post Author

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.

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

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

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.

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!

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.

By Post Author

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.

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.

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

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..

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.

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.

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?

By Post Author

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..

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.

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… :-/

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.

By Post Author

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 …

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

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?

@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.

By Post Author

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?

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).

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

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.

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?

@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 "?>“.

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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.

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’.

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?

By Post Author

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?

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

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.