WordPress Plugin for Paid Blogging

Sean created a new plug-in that will more than likely help out many people looking to make the most out of paid posting, or just blogging in general. Most paid posting requires you to meet a minimum number of words before you can submit your post. Up until recently, however, the only Word Count hack available with WP 2.0+ only showed you the post count in the administration panel after you hit ‘submit’ or saved the draft and then went back to edit it later. This doesn’t help paid bloggers who have to work quickly, especially on PayPerPost, where offers are taken as quickly as they’re uploaded.

So he created a plug-in that’s WP 2.2 compliant called Leprakhauns Word Count which adds this real-time word count to your Write Post page in WordPress. It counts the true words in the entry, not the a href link attributes that can confuse most programs. You type your entry and hit “Calculate Words” and it doesn’t reload the page, it just shows up in the designated text area next to the button. I was using his original JavaScript one up until a few moments ago, now I’ve got the official plug-in itself tapped into there. I altered it a little bit for my own personal usage but that’s because I use a different administration panel theme for WordPress than the default that many people use.

Either way, if you’re an active paid poster and always having some trouble getting your numbers correct when submitting your post, this plug-in would more than likely be good for you.

Note: This hack will only work with WordPress 2.2. I’ve noticed when going back to edit a post that the calculate option doesn’t work but that could just be based on my own installation. Please report any problems with the script to Sean about that one.

Note #2: UPDATE! The hack has been fixed and should now work properly with all 2.2 installations. Entries may be a few words off depending on the fact if you’ve got hyphenated words in your entry. So right now figure I’m typing-up about ten words. Since the hyphen is between two words, it’s only listing it as 9. The script, at this moment, counts spaces between words. After that, however, it’s extremely accurate.