Announcing the release of a new plugin for WordPress (single and multisite) that will allow you to use your purchase of aMember to protect your posts and/or pages very simply, easily and best of all – do it for FREE!

Download the plugin at the wordpress site here

Download aMember 30 day trial here

How to install

• Download the file from the official WordPress page or visit your WordPress dashboard, go to Plugins/Add New and search for “easy amember protect lite”.
• If you downloaded it, extract the folder from the zip file and upload the whole folder to your wp-content/plugins/ directory using FTP
• Activate the plugin

How to configure

The plugin assumes that your amember installation resides in a folder called amember in the root of your wordpress install. If your installation uses a different folder name or is in a different location you will need to set the correct location in the settings page.

How it Works

You should already have some products in your aMember setup and the PHP_Include plugin activated (it should be anyway).

The plugin will use the product ID number from your aMember setup as the value of the custom field you add to the posts or pages that you want to protect.

The aMember product you want to allow access to

Once you know your product ID, add the custom field to the post you want to protect.

If you want to allow access to more than one product, add a new custom field for each product.

Format your post with –more

If your blog shows the whole post in the archive view or blog post list, you need to use the < !--more--> tag after the text you want everyone to see. Once someone clicks on the title of the post or the link to read more, they will get redirected to the amember login page (if they aren’t already logged in).

the more tag in HTML mode

The more tag in wysiwyg mode

Have fun!

With a bit of imagination and time on the amember forums, you should be able to get your own premium content membership on WordPress site up and running in next to no time!

Notes

This plugin is not a replacement for the official amember wordpress plugin, it wont create a new user on WordPress or allow you to log in to both sites. It simply allows you to protect a single page or post from being seen by someone unless they have an active subscription to one of your amember products.

This plugin is provided ‘as is’ and is free for you to use any way you wish.

Hire me to do your dirty work!

If you want support, modifications and/or custom code then you can contact me on the amember forum (my username there is Andyb) with the details of what you want and request a quote. Prices range from 20$ for telephone support, 50$ for a simple mod, 100$ for custom coding additions and up to and over 250$ for more complex requests. (quotes are free and it costs nothing to ask!)

If you want to try out aMember before you buy, you can download a fully functional 30 day trial for free here. I recommend it if you need a quick solution to add a paywall to your site or you want to charge people to download an ebook, zip or other file.

Am I asleep dreaming I am awake?

Neo.. wake up

I’ve been working bloody hard for the past 13 weeks on something that still isn’t even close to being finished. It’s invaded my brain so much that even whilst on holiday, every time I closed my eyes I would wake up in a sweat thinking about it.

Seriously, almost every time I fall asleep I dream about it. Even my ever faithful friend – the afternoon nap has been compromised!

The Value of Giving

That’s it, that’s the mistress my missus has become increasingly jealous over. Mrs. VoG has been driving me crazy or filling me with joy over the past few months as I try and get her to play nice with amember and pap4 (two other saucy code maidens that I’m bending to my will(y))

Click the image to see if it’s ready, if it’s not just enter your details in the form and you’ll be notified when it is. Be prepared!, this has been a mammoth task to put together and will be a brand new way to do things.. oops, I nearly let the cat out of the bag.. you’ll just have to wait and see, I’m still under a non-disclosure agreement until it’s launch time.

Tens of thousands of lines

Nope, I’m not talking about a night out with Keith Moon from The Rolling Stones! .. I’m talking about the reason this will be so good , why it’s gonna blow everyone away and also why I’m going slightly doo-lally every time I close my eyes. It’s because I’ve written over 10,000 lines of code in custom plugins, modifications and additions to existing plugins.

I’ve needed to do this because even though we’ve spent thousands of dollars on commercial scripts and 3rd party engines, they just weren’t designed to do what we wanted to do. Close, but not quite and the ‘not quite’ bit has required hours and hours and hours of discussions over skype, conference calls, sketches and ultimately hundreds and hundreds of hours at my keyboard.

BIG PROJECTS SUCK ARE COOL

Haha! it’s been a duplicitous wench of a project so far, I’ve never sworn so much at inanimate objects. I’ve torn my hair out, freaked up/down/sideways and out until , as one of the partners, Mark says, “I’ve spent all my freak”

But, it’s also been hugely fun and satisfying to venture into unknown realms of WordPress, affiliate systems, membership packages, payment gateways and PayPal IPN scripts.

I’ve learned new things about WordPress that I never knew existed, things have gone in my head that can be used forever more on a metric tonne of future ‘what if?’ projects that I’m just gagging to get started on (yes, I really am a sucker for punishment!).

This is most definitely the biggest coding project I’ve ever worked on and as much as it is painful, it’s also fun. I’m really hoping that we can get to the open the doors stage soon because, if I don’t start seeing some action and if I can’t stop saying ,”not yet” when my missus asks if it’s ready then I might just get chucked out onto the street and honestly folks, without her, no tappy tappy code monkey.

Stick with me boyshz and galshz

Stick around, keep checking in and coming back to find out more because this is one huge momma of a site and well, it’ll rock the online business / hobby / charity / social and WordPress world. If you’ve ever had a business or a website or both, you’ll see the Value of Giving on day 1.

It always amazes me how much time and effort that people will put in to SEO tricks and tactics, how they swear that they know Google will ‘see’ this or ‘know’ that based on some rumour of a overheard bit of gossip written by a black hat SEO guru. Lol, what is a SEO guru anyway?

It’s an emperors new clothes designer that’s what! If someone tells you that they know what the Google algorithm wants then they are feeding you a line of BS because no one knows and if they did, Google would change it so it would be old news very quickly.

Is all SEO hopeless or even real?

Of course not! there are things that you can do that are known as ‘best practices’ or more commonly known as, ‘common sense’ and you can find out about them from Google itself from their webmaster pages and blog.

A good friend of mine who has successfully got his clients to the number one position on Google for their chosen terms recently wrote an interesting article on SEO and is it real?. He spends his life on and around Google search and even he says that you can try too hard.

The human factor

I recently had emails go to and fro with a colleague and she was quoting another SEO guy who said to bold this term and only do it once and how that is how the Google algorithm ‘knows’ what the article is about.

That makes me lol! Google algorithm ‘knows’ nothing! it can’t ‘see’ anything either, it can only trawl text and html source. It doesn’t look at images, it only stores what they’re name is and whether or not it has a caption and what that caption is.

Here’s a little experiment I want to try to prove that last paragraph..

Take a look at this server load graph showing how much the server was working (on ComLuv.com) for 24 hours..

Seems normal right? that’s right! because my UKFast host detected a spike of 70,000 or so hits coming in to the comluv signup page from an Amazon cloud server and within 30 seconds added their IP to my firewall so it can appear normal again but, look at the next pic after the ad break to see what a difference the banning made..

Can you frickin believe that difference? All because one IP from Amazon cloud was banned!

It seems that savvy hackers no longer need a bot network, they just get themselves some Amazon Web Services for pennies and use it to hack other peoples websites. Ridiculous!

Luckily, due to the sponsored post previous to this one about boobies and liposuction (thanks Dr. Alexander!), I was able to upgrade the server to use pro protection and fancy backups with lasers on it so this problem will hopefully never happen again.

Here are the ten most popular cosmetic procedures performed by Dr. Alexander Sinclair on South Santa Monica Boulevard in Beverly Hills California. Click to see the locations of his Cosmetic Surgery Facilities in Beverly Hills (Santa Monica Blvd)

1. Liposuction

Source: alexandersinclairmd.com

There were over 400,000 people this year that got their fat sucked through tubes into a bucket. Imagine how much soap Tyler Durden could make with that? lol

Some people have the money to do it and why not get a major surgical procedure done instead of paying 100x less for a gym membership if it means you don’t actually have to do anything more than turn up at the surgery?

But what if you do go to the gym and eat regularly? sometimes that’s not enough for some people, in that case you might consider a liposuction procedure. What it does is remove fat from the areas of your body that have the most concentrated fat cells. It can improve the overall appearance and give you the contour or silohette you’ve only dreamed of.

Various liposuction methods include the standard tumescent technique, ultrasound-assisted (aka Ultrasonic Liposuction), and the most recent variations of liposuction including Liposelection and SmartLipo.

You can see more examples, procedure types and read the benefits or side effects of liposuction at Dr. Alexanders Cosmetic Surgery website.

2. Breast Augmentation (boob job)

Source: alexandersinclairmd.com

Over 389,000 boob jobs were carried out this year in America, mostly on women and some even on tattoo women!

When performed correctly, breast augmentation does not have to be obvious to those around you. In fact, breast augmentation should result in a natural fullness to the breasts.

In some individuals, breast augmentation can be combined with a breast lift (mastopexy) if there has been significant drooping.

Click to read more about breast augmentation and see more before and after pictures.
see more on the next pages…

I’ve started coding the upgrade to my CommentLuv plugin, it’s going to be called CommentLuv 3.0 (original huh?)

More features than you can shake a stick at

This time around I want to do it all again from scratch and I’ve already got a good idea of what I’m going to add to it.

• Dofollow
  Just for the last blog post link and it’ll be configurable like Lucia’s linky luv plugin
• Keyword luv (sort of)
  This will allow a registered comluv user to have their registered site name next to their real name in their comment.
• Custom CSS
  How many people have been asking for this? lol, it’ll be in the new version!
• Use the new comment meta table
  I’ll store the last blog post, user id and request id in the comment meta so the comment text doesn’t get mangled and every link will be identifiable by the info panel. no more ‘cannot find member’ messages.
• Auto registration
  Why not allow the blog that installs commentluv to click a button and be registered straight away? yey!
• Premiumness
  I would like to add premium options, one would be to allow you to give your registered users a full 10 posts to choose from when they comment.

If there’s more you want to add, let me know in the comments…

[edit] I’ve just realized, this post is number 300 on this blog. Synchronicity. mmm Yummy.

The past month and the next month coming is, was and will be bloody hectic!

I have some major changes happening and I’m going to bookend it with a new hair style, gym membership and new hours of operation. I have to do something! I can’t keep going on like this, I need to knuckle down and focus on one thing and get it done and the only way I can do that is passing off some of the stuff that keeps me tied to the laptop every morning.

Staff!

We’ve had a member of staff down all month and she’ll be away until the UK skies get clearance from the volcano ash from Iceland so that’s been pretty awesome for making me cry day after day chopping onions It’s been ok though, I got to work side by side with my missus and I saw more sunlight than normal which has had a strange effect on making me want to get into better shape.

oodles of doodles

I’ve been going through the cartoonists workbook and it suggests lots of things that I’ve been trying. My notebook is always on hand and I’ve been scribbling like made to get myself up to a keyhole ken level of comic making.

It’s been going well, my doodles now only resemble that of a teenager! here’s my first effort

Comic blog!

Come and visit my comic blog and leave a comment, it’s got commentluv. woot!

I’ve been reading xkcd and Explosm for ages and I’ve always dreamed of having a comic blog. Well, more specifically, being able to draw well enough to have a comic blog!

Now, I’m not gonna let a little thing like not being able to do something to stop from doing something. I mean, how hard can it be?

Any stick will do

I have seen some literally LaughOutLoud good comics that are nothing more than a few straight lines on my stumbleupon sessions and I can’t help but think that it should be a breeze to do the same. oo-er, famous last words eh?

Check out this strip, it’s simply drawn and it made larf for ages. I sent it to 3 people!

I tried to make one in this style and it was hard! I did manage to make a simple comic once before on this blog, I used an online stickman comic maker which made things easier..

I wonder if it’ll be easier this time?

Comicpress wooot!

Enter in Comicpress which is a fantastic bit of WordPress shennanigans that enables anyone to create and update a comic based blog without worrying about ftp and specific filenames.

It’s currently powering a huge number of comic blogs and has helped a lot of regular folks create gorgeous comics like Starship Moonhawk or Dakota McFadzeans’ Blog and I want in!

It wont be able to help your drawing skills or your humour bone tuning but it will leave you to only worry about the drawing, all the rest will be handled by the system. It can handle graphic novels, simple strip comics, multi columns, custom colours, fancy pagination and a whole lot more!

It’s mildly overwhelming how many options there are to choose from so I think my best approach will be to start with a simple default layout and get creating and publishing. As I get used to the system, I’ll know what I need to change or update.

Learn me and you some learns

I’m all set up to start doing some more screencasts on my super fast PC and the weather is getting nice enough for me to be able to stay at the main pc without my fingers becoming frozen so I think it’s time to make some tutorial videos!

What better way to generate blog fodder than to start a tutorial series! and.. what better platform to do it on than ComLuv? (and it means I can use it as a legitimate ‘work’ activity)

ComicLuv

I have done some testing and I am fairly confident that it will work just as well on the live server. So, over the next few days I will be installing it to the ComLuv site as a supporter only feature. Anyone with a fiver a month can have a comic blog too!

I will be creating the comic blog and using the blogging side of it for tutorials and tales of my progress as I figure out what I use to draw the comics and other important stuff like how to draw or what is funny?

Freebies!

I’d really like to hear from you if you’ve ever considered making a comic blog, It’d be awesome to be able to have someone to compare notes with and share the journey.

What do you think? fancy making a comic on the ComLuv site? In exchange for taking the plunge with me and being someone who can chat with me about comic making, I’ll give you a full supporter account with access to all the themes and comicpress addons and a bunch of credits to get things like extra URLs on your comluv account.

It goes without saying that your new comic blog will get plenty of promotion and be mentioned along with mine in as many places as I can fit it