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I’m deviating from the typical type of post here at ViperChill today as I have something pretty awesome to announce: My first plugin, Reputation Management for WordPress, is now available for download. And it’s free. I’ve been using this plugin personally for months and decided that other people would really benefit from it, so now I’m releasing it here.
Reputation management (or monitoring, in this case) is about tracking your brand online. Just imagine if you could easily see when people are talking about your blog, your name, your products or anything else you want to track – all via your WordPress Dashboard. It’s always good to see who is singing your praises and it’s important to know who is criticising you or your brand so you can respond where necessary. Now you can see all that, quickly and easily.
Download & Installation
To download the plugin, simply click on this link. For now you can only install the plugin by uploading the folder to your server via FTP but I will be adding it to the WordPress Plugin depository shortly. Once you have extracted the folder from the .zip file, simply upload it to the plugins folder on your server:
wp-content/plugins/
It’s important that you upload the actual folder, and not just the files. Your folder structure should look like this:
wp-content/plugins/reputation-management/
Once you have uploaded the folder simply go to the Plugins area in your WordPress Dashboard and activate Reputation Management for WordPress.
You will then see a new menu item in the Settings Menu:
You can tweak the plugin from there.
How It Works
When you go to edit the plugin settings you will see the following panel. I’m going to run through each of them one by one and show you what they do:
1. This field allows you to enter keyphrases that you want to track around the web. The results are currently taken from Google blogsearch and Technorati. Some examples keyphrases here may be your name, the name of your blog, the name of your products, or even the names of your staff. Right now I’m simply monitoring “glen allsopp” and viperchill.
You can separate keyphrases with a comma and if you use multiple words in a phrase then it’s best to put it in quotes so it only shows results where those two words are next to each other.
2. Here you can enter how many results you want to show for each keyphrase. Entering 1 will show 1 result for each phrase from Google Blogsearch and 1 result from Technorati. Entering 2 in this form will show 2 results from each, and so on.
3. This is a cool feature I wanted to add which lets you link to any of your favourite bookmarks or other places where you want to check your brand reputation. For example you could link to Twitter search results for your name and have quick access to them. The HTML code for that would be:
<a href=”http://search.twitter.com/search?q=viperchill”>Twitter</a>
Simply change the word after q= to whatever you want to search Twitter for.
4. The bottom HTML functions exactly the same as the top, you just get an option to put the links wherever you want.
Once you’ve saved your changes, head to your Dashboard and you should see something like this:
You can click the ‘show more’ link to scroll through updates, and click ‘show latest’ to see the most recent updates again.
Planned Updates
I’m very happy with the plugin but my beta testers have already given me some more ideas on what to improve. Current planned updates are:
- Being able to see how many new items there are
- Being able to enter negative words so listings won’t show if they are in there
- Adding more services to monitor
- Possible tabbed options between each monitored service
This is really a side project for me so I can’t promise that any of these are going to be implemented but if there’s a big reaction to this then I will probably go ahead and do them.
Go test it out and let me know what you think!
RSS Subscribers: 
Cheers Glen. I’ve been using this for a bit now, as you know, and am very happy with it. Gives a nice instant snapshot on the terms I’m monitoring.
Thanks a lot for your help with that Carla.
You rock!
Awesome plugin! Thanks for releasing it for free:) Your work on this blog is very generous.
Thanks Tyron,
You’re welcome.
Glen
I’ve been using this for a while now. And I can tell you and others that it is really useful to get monitor keywords and mentions around the net without leaving my WP dashboard. I love it.
Suggestion:
- saved previous keywords in the setting page. As of now, every time you load the setting page, it is empty. And if we accidentally click ‘Save’, it will monitor nothing.
Thanks Glen. The basic idea is great. I’m sure the updates will be better.
Hi Book,
Your very early version of this plugin has changed dramatically. The save feature is no longer a problem (it saves your keyphrases now) and there’s now a more option so you can view more results.
Heh. Awesome!
In that case, I have to play with the new one.
Thanks Glen!
No worries.
Thanks for being an early beta-tester!
What a great resource. Looking forward to having a play. Thanks Glen!
You’re welcome Jen,
Thanks for stopping by!
Looks like a great plugin – i’ll be sure to try it out and report back.
Up until now I been using “Google Alerts” to track any mentions of my sites. However it looks like your plugin provides a lot more flexibility!
Thanks James,
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts!
Hey man,
Just tried the plugin again but I still have the problem with my incoming links in my WP dashboard showing errors. I hope it disappears with the next WP update
This plugin is going to make a lot of people very happy!
You are awesome!
Yeah, your initial problem is probably the cause of why this isn’t working. Fix your incoming links thing first and maybe it will work? Did you try to Google the fix…
I had a similar problem Diggy, solved it by editing my php.ini file in the public_html folder to boost the allowed memory consumption for PHP processes to 128mb (it defaults to 32mb).
Also check your phpAdmin to make sure you’re using a centralized ini file.
I have passed this on to Diggy. Thanks Josh!
How is a girl to concentrating on making money online when there are so many tools to play with? That came out wrong.
I recently discovered SEO Quake and find that I can’t navigate the web without it. Now this? :O You know I have to check this out
Hey Moon,
I never realised you were a girl (your pic is too small!). I think I’ve called you “dude” a few times…my bad.
Enjoy!
Great plugin! I can already see a ton of benefits for both me and my clients. Thanks for this!
You’re welcome Frank!
Thanks for stopping by.
I’ll be picking this up when I get home from work today.
Great job on this Glen.
Awesome Jay,
Let me know what you think!
Awesome Glen! I’ll be sure to check this out and download it when I get home tonight. By the way, I’m curious. Is this something you developed yourself or is it something you had an idea for and then outsourced the programming? I think it would be interesting to know the back story on this great plugin. Thanks for offering it up for free to the masses!
I had the idea and outsourced it.
I used to make my living by having ideas, getting them coded, and then selling them. I can build websites fine, but am hopeless at programming
Sweet,exactly the question I was going to ask! I am in the same boat. Plenty of idea’s but rubbish at coding, so just knowing this kind of stuff can be outsourced to your satisfaction is great.
Thanks for the Plugin Glen.
Looks great Glen, I’ll have to test it out on a bunch of my sites!
Glen, I think the pic is the problem. People assume I am a dude, indeed. I’ll have to tweak this soon. No worries
Awesome, thanks Glen..I’m off to install and try it out now.
You’re welcome Cori!
This is awesome Glen, thank you soo much for sharing it for free! I am going to figure out FTP (which scares me) without the help of one of my employees (hopefully!) and download this a.s.a.p.! Thanks again
Hey MK,
FTP isn’t that scary…I promise
Enjoy!
Great Glen! Thanks for the free plugin
Gonna upload it to the server now, will come back for feedback later.
Just checked out the plugin, very nifty. I’m trying my blog’s name, my own name, and twitter. It gives me a very good overview of what others are talking about my brand. Definitely would like to be able to filter out the links that are irrelevant, but it’s free so I won’t complain. Good plugin!
What kind of filtering option would you like to see?
Awesome plugin Glen ! Thanks for releasing it for free !!!
No problem Dev.
Glad you like it!
Excellent! – this plugin has been needed. I am looking forward to try this out. With real time search everyone should be aware of reputation management.
Thanks Glen! This plugin is awesome!
I emailed you a bug fix, but I thought I’d also post the solution here in case anyone else runs into the same problem and searches the comments for a solution.
Some web hosts disable the file_get_contents() function for security purposes. If the function is disabled then you get something like this on your WordPress Dashboard:
Warning: file_get_contents() [function.file-get-contents]: URL file-access is disabled in the server configuration in /home/raamdev/public_html/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/reputation-management/reputation-management.php on line 113
I devised a solution using cURL, which is commonly compiled in with PHP. I have written directions for making the modifications to reputation-management.php here: http://pastie.org/907204
Thanks Raam,
None of 20+ beta testers had the problem so I didn’t come across it. However, I’ll know where to send people if anyone has that issue.
Thanks a lot buddy!
Kudos to you for creating and sharing this plugin for free! May you be rewarded back a thousand fold.
Hi Glen
I uploaded your plugin and when tried to activate it says “The Plugin does not have a valid header”.
Did I missed something or messed something.
Thanks mate.
Hi Vinod,
Would you be able to give me admin rights to a wordpress account so I can take a look?
I got the same error message as Vinod,saying it lacks a “valid header.”
Thanks, I have someone looking into it as I type
Hey glen, I had the same problem as Vinod. If you send me an email with what email you want me to use, I can give you admin rights to my wordpress site. my email is thesocialrobot [at] gmail dot com
Hey Kelsey,
Thankfully Vinod kindly gave me admin rights so it’s being looked into.
Hey man – here is the error i get:
“Fatal error: Call to undefined function: simplexml_load_string() in xxxx/html/wp-content/plugins/reputation-management/reputation-management.php on line 115″
Can you email me the password for your admin area (create a new user if you like) so I can take a look?
HQ AT Viperchill.com
Cheers!
Hi Glen!
My name is Camila and last night i’ve just read your article about SA.
As I’m planning to do a volunteer work over there next year, I would like to talk about it to you, if it’s possible!
I’m Brazilian and I’m just finishing my Veterinarian College and as I’m too young I’d like to make an exchange cause i know i’ll have a lot of new experiences…by the way, i simply loved your article!!! You are a very good writter!!!
I hope you understand my english…
Have a nice weekend!
Camila
Hey Glen, thanks for the plug-in. I am just starting out with my own blog, and I am sure that it will be very useful as the days go by for, hopefully, finding out where my name is being mentioned elsewhere on the web. I think that this plus the incoming links module in the WordPress Dashboard are going to save me plenty of time. BTW, thanks again for the quick responses via e-mail.
Hey Glen,
great work, both on the plugin and, of course, the blog. Something seems to be funky with the plugin, though. When I have it activated, it causes the general info tab in my WP dashboard to show the number of comments for every set of data. So, basically, the tab will read “14 – 14. 14 – 14. 14- 14″, and so on. Really weird. It must have something to do with the plugin, though, because things went back to normal as soon as I deactivated it. Just thought I’d pass that along.
I’ve also run into this same problem.
hey glen, u are just awesome man, Thanks for the plugin, i needed it badly. I am off to install it now, Thank you so much.
I was stuck with google alerts and was desperately looking for a better tool.
Thanks a lot Glen!
just subscribing to comments to know when you find a fix for the error.
What is your error Katie?
If it is the SimpleXML one then you need your host to install the XML component.
If it’s something else, please email me with your admin login details.
[function.file-get-contents]: failed to open stream: no suitable wrapper could be found in /usr/www/users/blahblah/blah/wp-content/plugins/reputation-management/reputation-management.php on line 113
Can you give me an admin login and email me?
sure, just email me with the address attached to my comments
Cheers Glen
I’m only a blogging novice at the moment but this should be a great help if and when people actually start talking about me!
[...] Reputation Management for WordPress (Free Plugin) [...]
Wow this seems to be a good plugin which can do wonders in managing your online reputation. Thanks a lot Glen
[...] refining my dev team over the last few months, doing “practice” products such as the reputation management plugin for WordPress I released, but I’ll soon be ready to take things to the next level. I’m [...]
Hey Glen. Awesome work, I only wish I had this plug-in sooner. Will help a lot.
Gavin
Hey Glen,
Impressive plugin (jokes about how you could have called it pluginID, haha)
Hope you’re enjoying Thailand
Hello Glen,
I am in the process of converting a few sites over to WP and would love to see the latest status on your project, quite an impressive tool. I would also like to collaborate on case study and i definitely do get out of the box.
Appreciate this as well as some technical guidance when i implement.
This is an excellent tool I’ve been using it to monitor a couple of my sites and see whose talking about us so that I can determine which of my social marketing strategies have been effective.
Also used it to monitor my personal site to see if there has been anyone out there talking about me – tool like this is invaluable.
Hey,
Awesome concept. Love it – and thanks for releasing it that’s very generous.
What would be amazing is if you could chart it all on a nice simple graph like here:
http://www.locationmonitor.com/pages/features
Thy would be sweet and even worthy of a fee
. I would gladly pay for such a feature.
Hello there! I located your blog post on Google. It’s truly detailed and it helped me a lot. Continue on the good work!
That is a great plugin! Thanks for all the time you put in to help other people!
I will try it out!
Hey Glen. I remembered using this plugin on my portfolio, and it worked so well.
However, I tried using it on our latest venture (Physique Of The Week) and I am getting this error on the dashboard where the posts usually appear:
Warning: simplexml_load_string() [function.simplexml-load-string]: Entity: line 11: parser error : Input is not proper UTF-8, indicate encoding ! Bytes: 0xAB 0×20 0×53 0×75 in /home/abbott56/public_html/physiqueoftheweek.com/wp-content/plugins/reputation-management/reputation-management.php on line 115
Any Ideas?