A while back, while searching for something else entirely, I saw a WP plugin in use on someone’s random site which welcomed visitors arriving via search engine referrals specifically, saying “Hello, you got here looking for…” which I thought was a neat (in the British sense) way of supporting & managing all those random one-off visitors who find there way in through searches for particular phrases or places, or names.

Of course, when I tried to look for the plugin itself, I couldn’t find it. Oh, the irony.

So in the background, I’ve been trying to write a snippet of code which would sniff out a referring search term and do the honours for me. Time’s not been on my side, though, so I haven’t finished it yet.

…and just as well, because partly inspired by Matt Haughey’s excellent article on the subject, I discovered via feedreader this morning that the lovely Pete Ashton had found a WP-Plugin to do not exactly the same thing, but similar, showing a welcome message (and serving ads to) first-time visitors, which disappears on subsequent visits. And the fact that it’s a plugin meant that it took approximately 3 minutes to install, including starting the FTP client and making a cup of tea (optional).

So, if you’re coming here for the first time (or the first time since I implemented the plugin this morning) then you’ll see an ad above the first post on the page. When you return to the page, it should be gone, via the magic of cookies. If you don’t have cookies set on your machine, then it will always remain, though, because it checks for the presence of the cookie before showing the message and ad.

And, before anyone accuses me of selling out, I implemented the ad in that spot as well because given that there’s over seven and a half years of content on this site, it appears in a lot of web search results for all sorts of things, and as a result (no pun intended) about half my daily visitors are transients, though some are converted and come back. Which is nice. Hello!