Over the last few days I’ve released new versions of 3 of my WordPress plugins.

Flu Pandemic Level – updated to version 1.1. Re-tested and code tidied up, but no major changes.

Simple Wakoopa List – updated to version 2. This is a major update which introduces a new caching system, a new method of passing parameters, along with a slew of new switchable options.

Simple PayPal Donate – updated to version 1.2. Re-tested and code tidied up. New parameters to allow a target to be specified, and for the button image ALT text to be modified.

There’s more to come, including a brand new Twitter plugin.

A few months ago I finally had a donation via this site. My one and only. Needless to say, I was chuffed and even emailed the donater personally to thank them.

I heard nothing back until a few weeks later when PayPal informed me that the donater disputed the money and was requesting it back. They seemed to think it was for goods that I hadn’t delivered so I explained it was a donation and that my site name appears prominently during this process. They quickly backed my cause and rejected the dispute. However, their credit card company thought otherwise and withdrew the money.

But, hats off to PayPal, they persevered and disputed this “chargeback”. And won.

It is PayPal’s standard practice to dispute wrongful chargebacks. One of the benefits of using PayPal is that our team of chargeback specialists will gather the necessary information from you and work with the credit card company until the chargeback is resolved.

We appreciate your prompt response to our request for information about this transaction.

The money is now heading back towards me. Not that I longer feel that it was voluntarily donated out of good will, which is a shame.

But why would you donate a sum of money and then do whatever you can do to claw it back? Well, I suspect I know the answer. My Simple PayPal Donate WordPress plugin is quite popular and in all the code examples I use my details. I suspect someone has implemented it with my details by mistake and this person was attempting to donate elsewhere. None-the-less, it would have been my details (including site address) that would have appeared during this process.

On January 28th of this year I made available my first WordPress plugin – Simple AdSense Insert. I now have 6 in my portfolio, with another 2 about to be published. And in this short amount of time I’ve already learnt a few things.

1. Users don’t talk to you much, unless something isn’t working. Not that it’s a bad thing – I’ve been able to tweak instructions and even create new versions of my plugins thanks to this kind of response. However, I’d love to hear about what people would like to see in the way of improvements or even new plugins!
2. Users don’t donate So I’ll just have to keep trying to make my money from advertising!
3. Niche products aren’t so popular. I’ve created plugins for Wakoopa, TheThingsIWant and Readbag, but all have failed to do well. However, those for Twitter, Adsense and PayPal are doing a lot, lot better.

To demonstrate my last point, here is a graphical representation of how many people have downloaded my current plugins…

Pretty conclusive. Having said that, some of those result are scewed because of the length of time the plugins have been made available. So let’s change the results to represent the number of downloads over the days the plugin has been available…

Wow, that makes a huge different to my code embed plugin – the only one of the popular ones that isn’t somehow linked to another product.

In this case it’s popular, well, because it’s not linked to another service and it’s filling a role that doesn’t currently exist. When I wanted to put some code into my posts I couldn’t find a plugin to do it. There was one but the author kept the download to his site¹ and insisted on your email address (for sending you emails at a later time all about his other great stuff) before letting you know how to download it.

And this is it – populariting comes through one of two things.

1. A link to a service – money making or social networking – that’s rather popular
2. Being unique and providing a service that people are looking for

Now all I need to do is think of that one plugin that ticks both boxes. Of course, if you have an idea, I’m happy to hear your views!

1. if it’s not on the WordPress plugins site it won’t automatically inform you when a new version is available [↩]