Massive changes to the WP interface
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The term “improvements” is an empty term – it is used to justify tinkering for an ulterior motive. It would be more honest to simply speak of “changes”. “Improvements” it a nasty, arrogant term which implies that you have been using an inferior version but evidently were too short sighted or ignorant to notice.
It is the most widely used term on the Net which testifies of the endless arrogance of developers.
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I just had an experience of the unexpected kind. I clicked out of this forum back to ‘My Sites’. And guess what? A new page with big icons of all of my blogs appeared , including a little lock symbol for the private ones which is missing in the new list so you can no longer see which one of your blogs is set to private. I clicked on one of the blog icons and was immediately redirected to the new stats page. I’ve tried this again, unsuccessfully. What is going on?
I’m about to close down my remaining blogs as I’m unwilling to go searching for my stuff every time I log in as unfortunately I’m not in possession of a time machine which would allow me to catch up with the constant and in places even incoherent changes. -
Same here (and I’ve got screen shots this time! . But, it’s seems only from the forum. You can get back to your Admin/dashboard from the new stats, then may I recommend creating bookmarks for all the screen pages that you most use. Then open them as tabs as required. Works for me but shouldn’t be necessary so I’ hoping mad.
Please don’t close down your blogs just yet. We might see solution in time.
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I agree with grahaminhats. Make bookmarks for the administrative pages you want to visit, like Old Stats Page, “classic editor”, etc. I’ve done this from the beginning (over 7rs ago) because I thought the navigation wasn’t all that great and now it’s a total disaster.
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@ dandelionsalad
@ grahaminhats
I’m using different computers to log in so the bookmarking would only be an option for my home computer.
I really hope we have a new ‘my sites’ page soon. Managing nine public blogs and a couple of private ones via the new sidebar is quite an experience of its own. I wasn’t meaning to close them down completely, just go on a little ‘blogging strike’ or setting them to private for a while. -
jule61, do you check your email on this other computer? Make a draft message to yourself/blank, and put in the links that you need to have bookmarked, keep it in your drafts folder or move it to another category for easy finding.
I’ve had to use another person’s computer when I was out-of-town earlier this year, and fortunately I had some links to use that I saved in a draft message to myself. It is quite the time-saver.
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A return to the old stats page please or at least some way of making that the default.
The new page is “pidgin” relative to what it was. Both in terms of the quality of information and of the links available. A retrograde step which assumes that the intelligence of users is decreasing. -
this comment is more of along the lines of a new topic, but since I started this thread — which is probably the most commented on in the history of WP! — I will allow myself the latitude ;-)
most bloggers have no idea if the number of views they are receiving are reliable indicators as to how well they are doing at whatever stage of evolution their blog(s) happen to be — given certain basic parameters (amount of time their blog has been active, freshness of content, SEO sophistication, activity in so called “social media”, etc)
so a blogger might get maybe 20 or 30 views a day, start to lose hope, and wonder… is this “normal?” — and more importantly,”how can i improve it?”
how often have you seen other WP blogger mention in the forums that they receive somewhere along 2K-5K views a day (and complain about it!) or 10K Likes or only 100 comments per post, and you ask yourself: is this credible? — and then you look at their blog, and you ask yourself, how can these claimed numbers possibly be true? or more interestingly, if the blog is really cool, what are they doing, that you’re not, ie which are the measurable contributing factors that lead to the generation of these numbers?
with all this in mind, here are actual enhancement(s) to the STATS page that I would like to see implemented, enhancements that I think would end up being a MAJOR attraction in terms of WordPress’s effectiveness as a platform for everyday users who do not have armies of technicians and SEO wranglers at their disposal:
requirement 1: allow any given blogger to compare the views he or she receives on their blog and be able to chart these relative to the daily (or some other unit of time) averages of all blogs on WP
(b)
requirement 2: ~, but relative to daily (or some other unit of time measurement) of other blogs in a given category
and (c)
requirement 3: have the ability to cross compare your blog to the most popular blogs (which need not be identifies) by various standardized parameters (avg length posts, frequency of posts, # of pics in posts, etc etc the list could be quite exhaustive here, and including some very technical concepts)
I don’t know. Maybe this would be a great plug in, but then we could not use it here. I personally would like to see this baked into the Stats page itself.
This comment will probably get no response, so I’m already wondering as I finish typing this if this is the sort of thing that would be more appropriate to discuss in a Wordcamp or maybe, better yet, the upcoming LoopConf
Thoughts?
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— which is probably the most commented on in the history of WP!
Nope, see here:
https://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/beep-beep-boop-screen-is-a-joke-is-this-a-glitch?replies=945Cheers.
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galois – *S*
hmm okay i probably deserve that for my dash of hubris
so there must be someway way to check on threads ranked by number of comments
but who cares, more to the point is what did you think of the new ideas mentioned?
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Some good ideas there but the problem as I see it is that WordPress statistics are simply not reliable. Other page counters are much better.
Regarding popular blogs – have you seen this https://botd.wordpress.com/?lang=en It introduces it as “The most popular WordPress.com blogs are ranked here according to a special formula.” Like a lot of things with WordPress it is a farce, I hope I am not being unkind but most of the featured blogs are complete rubbish!
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Maybe I have missed the answer, but the one thing I can’t wrap my mind around is the fact that the new stats screen, according to what I’ve read here, is designed with desktop users in mind.
Let’s step back here so I can clarify one thing. The stats design is for desktop, but it has added responsive design to make it also work on mobile. It is not a mobile only design.
The overall new standard resolution for desktop users according to different stats (e.g. Techcrunch) is 1366 × 768. The new stats screens only uses 960px though (even less when you deduct the menu sidebar) and displays all content in one column. Why can’t responsive design accommodate to higher resolutions and give desktop users more columns? Can one of the involved developers/designers maybe shed some light on this decision? I’m honestly interested and would like to understand this. :)
My current procedure would be to scroll all the way down to get all the stats data. Then I would like to know what happened the day before. So I have to scroll up again to click the specific day on the bar chart and then the scrolling back down begins again. Why would this be considered a progress compared to the old stats screen?
Don’t get me wrong. If all of this is preparation work that leads to something awesome like a new desktop tool, I’m all for it, but at the moment, I don’t get this desktop user/960px thing.
Cheers
Martin -
>apetcher for that link, many thx. i did not know it existed! i will study these blogs, but i wonder what this special formula business is all about? is this a proprietary algorithm, or is more akin to whatever some intern happens to list on any given day?
re the featured blogs, I always wondered why has never been (to my knowledge!) been a sort of monthly contest where bloggers can vote on each other’s blogs? might be a headache to administer, but it could add to popularity, and increase views all around. a sort of democratic nominee vote getting system, with 19 finalists being voted on by the WP community at large.
lastly which other page counters are you referring to? r these something i can access or use without self hosting? i remember there was this ip counter one that you could embed in a text widget here but the problem is it had to be on the front or home page, and thus public (thus the shame of it all, when you had few views!). i forget its name, but i used it last year on my legacy blog. it told you the exact city and time user was coming from (yes I am aware of TOR and all the other caveats that WP mentions in their confusing stats page, but it was better than nothing!).
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>iqatrophie
it’s brain damaged, is all i can say. i dont know the strategic reason for the change(s), so i just use wordpress.com/my-stats for now
maybe the answer is as simple as it is too complex (for an org these of Automattic) to have multiple versions of WP, one for mobile, one for tablets, one for desktop, one for destops with very large monitors, etc) so they opted to have a mobile centric codebase in a sort of Occam’s razor approach
i mean understanding and developing WP core is no walk in the park, judging from intros to the subject such as this
and maybe because Automattic has (relatively) few developers, they decided to consolidate around mobile but did not have the resources to do comprehensive testing / but then again there is this open source aspect to WP, so I really have to do a lot more homework to get to the bottom of this
so bottom line who knows the true answer to all these deep mysteries. i do hope we will get it one day from that charming music person from saratoga springs. ;-)
me i just want to have a good idea as to my stats, how they compare to other users of WP, and what it is that these users do that I am not doing (I am not talking here about stupid SEO hocus pocus tricks that all the spamming hucksters try to sell on the Internet) that I could borrow from in order to legitimately increase traffic.
I know I can never compete against some 18 year old vixen taking selfies and talking about how much beer she drank the previous night, but short of that, there must something that a grown up person can do to actually get a better handle on their WP stats and how to improve them
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>apetcher i browsed through the list of featured blogs
the Norwegian one sharply written, an actual talent there with words and keen observational acumen
these 2 were good conceptually
and honorable mention to this last one — despite some technical issues
as for the rest, meh, as we say in ny
btw your blog is pretty good too! amazing # of hits. cheers.
k really going off topic now so will go back to wringing my hands about the stats page.
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I would like to add my objections to the new stats page. I cannot find the summaries for the different sections on it, which I have always found helpful. Why are we being forced to change to a version of the stats page that is not as helpful or beneficial to bloggers?
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@ apetcher
I followed that link and found a blog I thought I’d try following. I am follower # 52. Enough said.
@ everyone
I’ve been lurking for a while and wanted to make an observation. We shouldn’t forget that bandwidth costs money and, for WP.com, it may be the company’s largest expenditure. “Loads faster” equals “less bandwidth.” Beep Beep Boop (which I do not use) and its saving of drafts in your browser instead of on a server also follows this budgetary pattern… whether that was the intent or not. So does the fact that, since last year, we get a mobile-friendly page in the Reader instead of a direct link to the blog when we click on a headline.
“Mobile-friendly” may be a red herring when the real evolution has been cost-cutting. At the very least, it’s a more competent marketing message.
That said, I have not seen WP’s financial numbers and I cannot say whether cost-cutting would be budgetary necessity or a grab at additional revenue. At the end of the day, WP is a business and I would assume that the vast majority of its users don’t spend a dime. Although I’m not entirely fond of the changes we’ve seen, change might be necessary. Hopefully there’s a way to satisfy the user needs expressed in this thread as well as the needs at WP we know little or nothing about.
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Interesting – I find the idea that it’s cost-cutting quite convincing. But I have to disagree about most of us not spending a dime. As a minimum we either have to pay to keep ads away or provide our blogs as free platforms for WP to use to sell advertising space. So, one way or another, they make money from us all. No such thing as a free blog…
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@fictionfanakaff
In fact the primary source of income for WordPress.com is upgrade subscriptions. http://www.forbes.com/sites/jjcolao/2014/06/11/an-extended-interview-with-wordpress-creator-matt-mullenweg/
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