Wordpress.com Issues Resolved
TL:DR; Wordpress.com hosted sites (does not affect .org/self hosted sites) widgets were broken, now they are fixed.
A few days ago it was brought to our attention that widgets on Wordpress.com hosted sites were no longer functioning and displaying an incorrect concurrent user count.(if you run your own install of WP on your own server this wouldn't have affected you).
What happened was that, in the latest update to the Wordpress.com platform, the Photon functionality was turned on by default. Photon retrieves images embedded in your blog once and then hosts them off of Wordpress' servers to speed up blog serving time by reducing the number of locations your browser has to look for image assets. While this is a great feature in most cases it causes a problem for services like whos.amung.us where we rely on the blog users loading the widget image from our servers so that they can be counted in the stats. With Photon proxying our widget images no one was getting counted in the stats for sites hosted on Wordpress.com as the end users never requested the widget images from us directly.
We've been working with Automattic (the fantastic company behind Wordpress) over the past few days to find a solution that allows whos.amung.us widgets to continue functioning on Wordpress.com hosted blogs, and I'm happy to report that there is a solution now in place that allows the whos.amung.us widget to work properly once again!
You shouldn't need to make any changes to your widget code, but if you are seeing a lot of "Unknown" users in the readers list on your whos.amung.us stat pages you might want make a very small change to your widget code to serve the widget off of https and not http.
Example, if your widget code looks like:
Change it to:
The only difference is the
As always, if you have any questions don't hesitate to contact us.
A few days ago it was brought to our attention that widgets on Wordpress.com hosted sites were no longer functioning and displaying an incorrect concurrent user count.(if you run your own install of WP on your own server this wouldn't have affected you).
What happened was that, in the latest update to the Wordpress.com platform, the Photon functionality was turned on by default. Photon retrieves images embedded in your blog once and then hosts them off of Wordpress' servers to speed up blog serving time by reducing the number of locations your browser has to look for image assets. While this is a great feature in most cases it causes a problem for services like whos.amung.us where we rely on the blog users loading the widget image from our servers so that they can be counted in the stats. With Photon proxying our widget images no one was getting counted in the stats for sites hosted on Wordpress.com as the end users never requested the widget images from us directly.
We've been working with Automattic (the fantastic company behind Wordpress) over the past few days to find a solution that allows whos.amung.us widgets to continue functioning on Wordpress.com hosted blogs, and I'm happy to report that there is a solution now in place that allows the whos.amung.us widget to work properly once again!
You shouldn't need to make any changes to your widget code, but if you are seeing a lot of "Unknown" users in the readers list on your whos.amung.us stat pages you might want make a very small change to your widget code to serve the widget off of https and not http.
Example, if your widget code looks like:
<a href="http://whos.amung.us/stats/cgkoub7au35q/">
<img src="http://whos.amung.us/widget/cgkoub7au35q.png" width="81" height="29" border="0" title="Click to see how many people are online" />
</a>
Change it to:
<a href="http://whos.amung.us/stats/cgkoub7au35q/">
<img src="https://whos.amung.us/widget/cgkoub7au35q.png" width="81" height="29" border="0" title="Click to see how many people are online" />
</a>
The only difference is the
http in the img tag has been converted to https .As always, if you have any questions don't hesitate to contact us.
