Tag: development

AdRotate 5.16 – Dashboard overhaul

AdRotate Banner Manager 5.16 is the first in a few upcoming updates to overhaul the dashboard. It struck me that in the last 15 or so years the dashboard has remained pretty much unchanged. While that is fine, stable and predictable, a bit of updating isn’t back.

So to start for all settings pages the look has been updated to include backgrounds, rounded corners and the ‘ugly’ banner at the bottom of each page has moved to a sidebar in settings. I’ve also re-added the RSS feeds so people can actually see blog updates – Including this post – if they want to.

I’m not entirely sure what to do with the management dashboards, but they’ll likely see some updates in the coming few updates as well. Clear your browser cache if the new dashboards look misaligned or like they’re missing bits and pieces.

Another thing brought to my attention were some inefficient queries for stats. These have been fixed and updated as well. On average, on my tiny test site, these queries are now at least twice as fast. And in searching for other queries to improve I found a few typos and quirks that have been fixed as well.

Please report suggestions and issues

If you see something isn’t right with the plugin, even stupid things like typo’s. Please report them. AdRotate has a support forum on wordpress.org for that. But if you feel the issue is important enough you can always email me with your question or concern.

Without your reports, suggestions or insights I can’t improve the plugin. So please send in your suggestions and report issues, bugs and quirks as soon as possible. Providing some insights on why software doesn’t work for you is very important for developers to improve their products.

Changes in version 5.16

  • Performance – Faster queries for loading certain stats
  • Performance – Added faster INDEX for stats and stats_archive tables
  • Change – Database version 75
  • Change – Moved action links to plugin meta text
  • Fix – Widget title no longer converts to a slug
  • Update – All dashboard settings pages refreshed
  • Update – Support dashboard page refreshed
  • Update – Notification texts and footer banner
  • Update – Block code

Download

The update is available for WordPress and Classicpress. Please update AdRotate today, available through automatic updates in your dashboard, via direct download through this website and Github. If you do not have AdRotate or AdRotate Professional yet, get your started with ads today through the product pages below.

AdRotate Pro 5.18 – Multisite compatibility

AdRotate Pro 5.18 improves Multisite (or Network) compatibility by properly listing network ads in groups in instances. The missing dashboards for instances on a multisite has been fixed as well.

For accessibility the tracking pixel now has an alt attribute, because who cares about that for invisible images right? Right Google? And for clarity the block descriptions for Adverts and Groups have been updated to better reflect how they should be used. And finally, webp images now show up where they should in the asset manager.

Changes in version 5.18

  • [update] Added alt tag for tracking pixel
  • [update] Updated advert block description
  • [update] Updated group block description
  • [fix] Not all relevant files showing in subfolders
  • [fix] Wrong value for switching blog databases in multisites
  • [fix] Missing dashboards for multisite instances

Download

The update is available now, you can update through automatic updates in your dashboard or via direct download in your dashboard. Or if you do not have AdRotate Pro yet, get your copy today through the product pages below.

Goosle 1.6 is available now on Github!

Goosle 1.6 is a big update to previous versions including a number of bug fixes and many new and improved features.

If you use caching, results now have pagination. You can configure how many results per page Goosle should show in the config.php. Goosle also tries to detect a more meta data for magnet results, such as movie codecs, audio formats and language. A lot of this data can be assumed from the torrent title and Goosle tries to standardize on the terms to make finding stuff more easy and predictable.

Crawlers

A new crawlers for Wordpress developer pages is added and all crawlers have been updated and tweaked and optimized. Most notably, all engines would individually process your query and interpret what you want from it. This has been moved to be processed earlier in the search routine allowing a new object with predictable and standardized data which is shared with all relevant engines.

This basically means that Goosle no longer has to dissect your query multiple times per search, depending on how many engines you have enabled this could be 1 to 8 times, just to detect if you want safe mode on or off. Or if you wanted a special search or not.

Stats

Goosle 1.6 counts how many searches you do on it. Every query that gets processed is counted. You’ll find the link for it in the lower left corner in the footer. I thought it would be interesting to see how many searches Goosle handles.

Other improvements

On top of the obvious stuff, a lot of code has been updated and improved. Stuff you don’t really see. Double code has been merged into functions to be re-used for example. Magnet trackers have been updated, a few removed, a few new ones.

Special searches have been updated to look more uniform. And the dark theme has had some tweaks to mute the brighter colors a bit. The help page has been updated. The Dictionary search has been improved and much more small tweaks and improvements.

Changes in version 1.6 released on July 15, 2024

  • NOTICE: config.default.php has changed, update your config.php!!
  • [change] Moved magnet popups into combined function
  • [change] Better handling of EZTV TV Show data
  • [change] Better handling of YTS movie data
  • [change] Added 6 new public trackers for Magnets
  • [change] Removed regularly unresponsive trackers for Magnets
  • [change] Search query string processed before search so all engines don’t have to do it individually
  • [change] Updated help page
  • [new] Special searches can have a note/disclaimer in the lower right corner
  • [new] Results pagination for all search tabs (Requires caching to be enabled)
  • [new] WordPress function, hook and filter lookup as a special search (See help page)
  • [new] Language meta data for some Magnet results
  • [new] Try to detect audio codec for EZTV results
  • [new] Show MPA Rating for some movie results
  • [new] Filter to include NSFW Magnet results or not
  • [new] Override NSFW filter with prefix keywords (see config.php)
  • [new] Simple search stat counter (Link in footer)
  • [tweak] Muted the blue and white text in dark theme a tiny bit
  • [tweak] Better light blue header in light theme
  • [tweak] Added title and alt attributes to relevant links/images
  • [tweak] Removed Magnet search limit of 200 results
  • [fix] HTML rendering issues for tags in paragraphs
  • [fix] Start page buttons in light theme now use the right css variables
  • [fix] Properly decode quotes in code snippers for PHP special search
  • [fix] Image, News and Magnet search no longer work if they’re disabled in config.php
  • [fix] 2nd search suggestion not showing if it’s available
  • [fix] Removed non-functional checking if query is empty in every engine
  • [fix] Correctly uses user provided auth hash to keep searching
  • [fix] Correctly ‘expire’ share links for guests so they can not use Goosle beyond seeing the shared results

Try Goosle for yourself

I’ve made the source code available on Github. https://github.com/adegans/Goosle

Goosle should work on most modern servers that have PHP7.4 or newer and should take less than 10 minutes to install and set up. All you need is basic webhosting and a domain name. Check the included readme.md or the Github page for details.

Getting help

You can post your questions on Github as a discussion.

Analytics Spam Blocker 4.0 – Thousands more domains blocked!

Over the last few weeks and days I have re-done most of the plugin to make getting more domains to block more easily. As a whole the whole reporting system didn’t really work and the plugin never really took off like I hoped. So I devised a new system for referral spam protection.

Instead of dealing with 10-20 reports per year I’ve closed the whole reporting system effective immediately. Instead Analytics Spam Blocker will rely on publicly available blocklists and use those.

As an extra you can create your custom list and add more domains to that. The dashboard has been updated to reflect these changes. The blocklist is updated weekly through a background task. Currently the list holds about 2280 domains, which is already way way more than Analytics Spam Blocker had to begin with. This makes the plugin much more hands-off but also more effective for everyone.

Changes for Analytics Spam Blocker version 4.0

  • [new] Referral spam list from Matomo
  • [new] Weekly update referrel spam list from Matomo
  • [new] Check if domain already is blocked
  • [change] Code cleanup
  • [removed] Spamblocker API reporting

The download for Analytics Spam Blocker should pop up in your dashboard shortly. Or you can download the plugin here: https://ajdg.solutions/product/analytics-spam-blocker-for-wordpress/

Goosle 1.5 is available now on Github!

Goosle 1.5 is a huge update to previous versions including a number of bug fixes ranging from no longer caching empty results to better handling and formatting results. But also has a ton of new features and new search engines to get results from. Much improved Magnet and Image search and a dedicated News tab and a Box Office page for new torrent releases on some popular sites.

Crawlers

New crawlers include Brave Search, Yahoo News and Sukebei (porn anime). Actual engines got added through their API are Qwant, Qwants Images, Qwant News and Hackernews.

The Openverse token renewal process got improved as well.

Other improvements

Goosle 1.5 now sends more accurate headers to servers in order to get a better response and to try and mask itself as a browser, and not a Meta Search engine. With the current search engines this seems to work very well.

Various CSS elements got tweaked and improved so Goosle looks even better. And as requested, Goosle gained colorschemes. Current colorschemes are light, dark and default. You can choose which one to use in the config.php.

Magnet results got vastly improved with better meta data. A ‘more info’ popup for certain downloads that show movie summaries and download links. Goosle also tries to detect more and relevant meta data from video and audio results. And, to make sharing Magnet Results more easy there is a share function that copies a special url to your clipboard. You can then share that url to have the result highlighted in the Magnet Results.

With all these new features and search options the config file got a lot of new settings. Some have been removed, so make sure your config.php file matches the options offered in config.default.php. You can add them in more-or-less the same order or start a new config.php file from the default one. Check the readme.md file for some pointers on how to deal with this.

Cronjobs got expanded

Cronjobs are scheduled background tasks a website or script can do. Goosle has a simple script to run in the background too. In previous versions this was mostly to clean up the file cache and perhaps generating Openverse tokens. But in version 1.5 the update check has been moved into the script as well. Check the readme for details on how to set up a cron job.

Changes in version 1.5 released on June 19, 2024

  • NOTICE: config.default.php has changed, re-create your config.php!!
  • [fix] No longer caches empty results
  • [fix] No longer make a request if the search query is empty
  • [fix] Movie highlight/box office cache now works
  • [fix] Language selector for Qwant, Wikipedia and Duckduckgo
  • [fix] Season and Episode filter for tv show searches
  • [fix] Safe search filter now actually works
  • [fix] Magnet Search category exclusion filter now actually works
  • [fix] Image size filter works more reliably
  • [fix] Handling of doublequotes in search queries
  • [fix] Search sources now show result amounts accurately
  • [fix] Old cache files are now actually deleted when expired
  • [fix] Search tabs not properly centered on smaller screens
  • [new] Box Office page with latest/new downloads from a few supported torrent websites
  • [new] News page with the latest news from major outlets
  • [new] Popup with movie info and download links for YTS Movie Highlights
  • [new] CSS colorschemes configurable in config.php
  • [new] Easily share magnet links with other Goosle users
  • [new] Search results from Quant API
  • [new] Search results from Brave
  • [new] Image results from Qwant Image API
  • [new] News results from Hackernews
  • [new] News results from Yahoo! News
  • [new] News results from Brave News
  • [new] News results from Qwant News API
  • [new] Magnet results from Sukebei.nyaa.si
  • [new] Special search for IP Lookups via ipify (Search for “ip” or “myip”)
  • [new] Safe search switch for Yahoo! Images
  • [new] Image size switch for Qwant Images
  • [new] Merge missing magnet meta data from duplicate results if it doesn’t already exist in the matched previous result
  • [new] Detect meta data for Magnet Search results such as sound and video quality.
  • [tweak] Cache ttl is now in hours (was minutes)
  • [tweak] Optimizations in CSS, HTML separators and more
  • [tweak] Moved icons into CSS so they can be colored using colorschemes
  • [tweak] Better handling of image results
  • [tweak] Better handling of empty/incomplete results for all engines
  • [tweak] Better handling of empty/missing meta data for all magnet engines
  • [tweak] Better category detection for Limetorrent magnets
  • [tweak] Raised Magnet search limit to 200 (was 50)
  • [tweak] Raised Wikipedia search limit to 20 (was 10)
  • [tweak] Hide magnet results with 0 seeders by default
  • [tweak] Uniform array formatting for all engines
  • [tweak] Consistent use of single-quotes and double-qoutes
  • [tweak] File size string conversion and formatting for all image and magnet engines
  • [tweak] Update checks are now done weekly(ish) via the Cron job
  • [tweak] Updated .htaccess caching rules
  • [removed] CSS for 320px viewport

Try Goosle for yourself

I’ve made the source code available on Github. https://github.com/adegans/Goosle

Goosle should work on most modern servers that have PHP7.4 or newer and should take less than 10 minutes to install and set up. All you need is basic webhosting and a domain name. Check the included readme.md or the Github page for details.

Getting help

You can post your questions on Github as a discussion.