It seems CommentLuv is enjoying an upsurge of installs again, this usually happens when a big blogger like The Brown Baron, Revellian, Howtospoter or John Cow installs it and gives it a mention so I thought I had better address some (small) issues with it and give it a rewrite.
I’ve sketched out the first draft of the flow chart which is a good reminder in my own mind of how things link together. It’s a chart that will expand further and take up more and more space, from experience I think it will take another 4 or 5 sketches to get the full flow down on paper and then I can take that and refine and expand it to take into account the individual functions and then I can start on the coding proper!
Some things I am going to put in this new version…
- Options Page
- Change displayed text under comment area
- Change styling options for last blog post display
- Change message for last blog post display
- Option to use external script for blogs with no curl support
- Setting for how hard the plugin should look for the feed
- Setting for enable CommentLuv by default
- Timeout setting for MAGPIE
- AJAX support for background fetching during comment entry*
- Include MAGPIE library in plugin directory**
- Tidy up WP_OPTIONS function for older versions of CommentLuv
* Use jquery to call the function after the comment author URL field loses focus, this will store the authors feed in the cache so when the user submits the comment, the feed in the cache will be used. This will prevent any hanging around after the comment has been submitted while the plugin searches for the feed location.
** Currently, there are some cases of the default include of MAGPIE saving each and every feed cache to the WP database in WP_OPTIONS/OPTION_NAME which tends to make it grow quite large, also some users have reported it being set to “autoload on” which can have an effect on load times. This wont happen if I use a separate MAGPIE include.
So, that’s it, those are my ideas for the new version of CommentLuv. Do you have any suggestions for things you’d like to see?


March 30th, 2008 on 10:41 am
I’m a big blogger? Hahaha! I can’t wait for the new version – I think it will be even cooler than it already is. I can’t think of anything to help out, but I do support you 100% and love Comment Luv!
Bobby Revell’s last blog post..Advertising On Your Body and Soul
March 30th, 2008 on 10:52 am
Bobby: this is what makes you a ‘big blogger’, you’re here on a post that mentions you and it wasn’t because you were prompted by a pingback, it’s because you actually go out and read your visitors blogs and take the time to participate. You’ll always be a big blogger in my eyes because of your sincerity, authority, reach and influence. Thanks so much for your support, it’s what motivates me to put so much time and effort into creating things like CommentLuv.
March 30th, 2008 on 3:37 pm
I like comment luv as well, without which I guess I wouldn’t know about a terrific piece of work like Mr. Revels’ blog. What an amazing blog that is, by the way, makes be feel a tad inadequate, making me painfully aware of my limitations, both technically and as a so-called a ‘blogger’. In fact, describing myself thus would seem to be an bit on an insult to people like Bobby and Andy.
Thats the trouble, I like reading blogs but often leave without comment, which is just not nice and something I must learn to correct. It feels a bit like turning up at a party, getting as much free food and drink as you can, then leaving without introducing yourself to the hosts. Or something like that.
So, what feature would I like to see?
No ideas I am afraid, I know my place
Rich’s last blog post..e-lottery success- the Sue Pearson way.
March 30th, 2008 on 5:52 pm
That’s strange, in a fit of guilt for all the comments I could have made but did’t, I headed over the Bobbys’ blog to make ammends, and it didn’t work! Twice!
Oh well, at least I made the effort, eh !
Rich’s last blog post..La la la Latvia!
March 30th, 2008 on 6:03 pm
Rich » don’t worry Rich, Bobby has set all comments to hold for moderation so he can reply to each and every one as it comes in. That’s why it looks like your comment didn’t work, it’ll turn up as soon as he’s had a chance to read it
March 30th, 2008 on 10:44 pm
Ahhh of course, silly me.
Oh well, I will leave this thread with a nice quote I found today.
“A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.”
Herm Albright
1876-1944, Author
Rich’s last blog post..La la la Latvia!
March 30th, 2008 on 11:44 pm
Rich: haha! great quote! well done on your latvia signup too.
March 31st, 2008 on 3:12 am
Hey Andy,
I really like your CommentLuv plugin, and I’ve been seeing it all over lately, so apparently I’m not alone. It definitely works too … for example, I’m here because I followed a comment you left on Bobby’s blog. Although truth be told, I’m sure I would have seen in it my feed reader eventually too.
I do have one question about the plugin. It doesn’t appear to me that it automatically removes “nofollow” from comments (even here on your blog). To have comments followed, I have to use CommentLuv in conjunction with one of the DoFollow plugins (LinkLove in my case). Perhaps, if it’s not too difficult, you could add that feature to the options panel of a future update? ie, let me set the number of comments somebody has to leave before their links become followed … basically just combine the functionality of your plugin with something similar to LinkLove.
I hope that was clear
Thanks,
Todd
Todd Morris’s last blog post..I Started Blogging Just Over A Year Ago
March 31st, 2008 on 11:36 am
Todd: thanks for your comments, the plugin does have some code in it that is supposed to prevent wordpress from adding a nofollow attribute to the link but it only does it at time of submission so if wordpress gets to do something with the comment afterwards like during a moderation or if it is edited then wordpress adds the nofollow back in. I will have a look at linklove and see if I can incorporate it’s functionality into the new version of CL
March 31st, 2008 on 10:50 pm
Andy,
I’ve been getting similar requests for the Drupal version and I’m going to integrate an options page for settings such as having it automatically selected as default.
I think we need to discuss how we can separate the core functionality (ie the functions that are used for fetching RSS feeds) from the WordPress/Drupal code.
Perhaps put them in a separate file that can be included with our own code?
Email me if you want to discuss this further. I’ve been getting a lot of good feedback about the plugin for Drupal.
Pete White’s last blog post..How to Create Your Own HDR Photos/Photomatix tutorial
April 1st, 2008 on 1:00 am
Pete: I am working on this very thing as we speak, I should have something for you tomorrow (if there’s not much work on in the office!)
April 1st, 2008 on 9:49 am
Excellent, I have this issue that you might be able to look at whilst you are coding, I think its a problem with escaped characters http://drupal.org/node/239327 .
I’m moving offices on Thursday and house on friday so wont be able to get much work done this week.
We need some sort of developers page on the commentluv site you think?
Pete White’s last blog post..How to Create Your Own HDR Photos/Photomatix tutorial
April 1st, 2008 on 12:33 pm
Pete: I think this is something to do with the way MAGPIE treats escapted characters, it doesn’t like the apostrophe’s in words either. It is fine to pick up japanese posts et al but seems to have issues with some blogs. I think I might need to do something to take out the reliance of magpie as the feed parser, I’m sure there must be an easier way!
I’ll look into getting a developer page on commentluv.com today…
April 2nd, 2008 on 10:52 am
Nice one! Do you know when youll be finished? =) Is there anything i can do to help? *php coder*
cheers
Gobba’s last blog post..Server rooms of DEATH!
April 2nd, 2008 on 11:51 am
Gobba: I was playing about with it last night so I can remove the need to depend on the magpie includes within wordpress.,.. check out the new post about it later…
April 2nd, 2008 on 11:59 am
Andy,
Great news – are you writing your own equivalent functions for fetching RSS feeds then?
Thanks
Pete
Pete White’s last blog post..Earn up to £5000 from Laptops Direct
April 2nd, 2008 on 12:19 pm
Pete: actually, that’s what I used to do in the first versions of CL. I ended up going with the included magpie files because that seemed to work more often that relying on using fopen or file commands which sometimes hiccupped on some cheaper hosting packages.
I am working on it right now…
April 2nd, 2008 on 10:45 pm
Hi,
Michael from Germany here.
If i could make a wish, i’d suggest a function that allows a commenter to choose which of his post would get linked to.
So that not the last post shows up, but the one that the commenter has chosen, because he regards it most relevant or topically close to the post he is commenting on.
This way an array of related blog post might evolve, which could even lead to a new sort of post-tags …
Hmm, perhaps too visionary or abitious …?
What do you think?
Regards,
Michael
Michael’s last blog post..New Tool Will Put Your Listbuilding On Steroids
April 9th, 2008 on 5:46 pm
Hi Andy,
Great plugin, but unfortunately I fall into the camp that are having problems with Magpie saving every feed in the wp_options table.
I think it stored the complete feed for 58 sites (116 records in wp_options, 2 for each). This increased the size of wp_options from 0.5MB to 3.5MB. For the moment, I’ve had to disable the plugin.
I remain a firm believer in the plugin and I’m looking forward to the update. Sounds good! Thanks for a great plugin.
Stephen Cronin’s last blog post..New WordPress Plugin – KeywordLuv
April 9th, 2008 on 7:56 pm
Stephen: there is some simple code that can clean out those lines
<?php
include_once(‘wp-config.php’);
include_once(‘wp-includes/wp-db.php’);
$sql = ‘DELETE FROM `wp_options` WHERE `option_name` LIKE \’rss_%\”;
$results = $wpdb->query($sql);
echo ” $results rows found and removed containing rss_*”;
$sql = ‘OPTIMIZE TABLE `wp_options`’;
$results=$wpdb->query($sql);
echo “\noptimize table (0/1) $results”;
?>
I’ll put it on the main commentluv page too, just put that code into a text file, save it as clean.php and upload it to your root of your blog and then browse to it on your browser, that should get rid of any excess rss
new version is soon!
April 9th, 2008 on 8:17 pm
Hi Andy,
Thanks, great service! Actually, I’m sorted (via CPanel), but there may be others.
I think the new version is going to be GREAT and I can’t wait to get my hands on it…
Stephen Cronin’s last blog post..New WordPress Plugin – KeywordLuv
April 30th, 2008 on 10:39 am
G’Day Andy,
For some reason CommentLuv doesn’t seem to be working.
I have WordPress 2.3.2 installed and the latest version of CommentLuv.
I’ve had a couple of my reader leave comments with no links back, subsequently they contacted me asking why.
I tested it by adding a comment of my own, but didn’t receive a link back to my latest post.
Can you help please?
Ian
Ian Richardsons last blog post..I’m giving more Luv, now with CommentLuv and KeywordLuv
May 12th, 2008 on 2:32 am
I never thought about getting two links back when you comment on a blog with CommentLuv. Now there is more reason to comment than ever before!
Stop Grinding Teeth – Sheilas last blog post..How To Stop Grinding Teeth At Night
May 23rd, 2008 on 9:11 pm
I agree that encouraging comments is a great thing – even if the people reading are just commenting to get that link. As long as they read, contribute to the article and put something intelligent – then they should have that link there. It is a good service to help other people get those links.
May 27th, 2008 on 10:32 pm
I’m hoping commentluv will start implementing the same features from other software – like keywordluv and some spam prevention aps
July 6th, 2008 on 3:32 pm
Dear Andy,
Thanks for sharing the fixing code for older versions of CommentLuv. I’ve replaced the quotations mark so that they’ll be parsed correctly:
<?phpinclude_once('wp-config.php');
include_once('wp-includes/wp-db.php');
$sql = 'DELETE FROM `wp_options` WHERE `option_name` LIKE \'rss_%";
$results = $wpdb->query($sql);
echo " $results rows found and removed containing rss_*";
$sql = 'OPTIMIZE TABLE `wp_options`';
$results=$wpdb->query($sql);
echo "noptimize table (0/1) $results";
?>
However, even after doing so, I’m still getting an error message that goes like this:
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_STRING in /home/teddy/public_html/clean.php on line 9
Thanks a lot for your help!
p/s: I’ve upgraded to the latest verion but rolled back to v0.999 because the latest version doesn’t seem to work properly. I’m currently using WordPress 2.5, with several comment-related plugins – Spam Karma 2 and WP Thread Comment.
July 20th, 2008 on 6:26 pm
sorry, it looks like wordpress messed with the quotation marks in the comment section so here is a link to download a zip containing the file you would need in the root of your blog install, just browse to it in firefox or IE to run it (don’t forget to remove the file after you’re done)
http://www.fiddyp.co.uk/download/cleanupCL.zip
October 15th, 2008 on 9:07 am
I must admit that you are a hard worker Andy. I reckon every time I go to the dashboard there is another update and the plugin just gets better and better.
Sire´s last blog post..Hosting An Effective Blog Contest
February 4th, 2009 on 8:33 am
That’s a wonderful blog entry, thanks for sharing. We just started a blog ourselves and I’m a complete newbie at this so kudos for such a good job on your blog! Good read by the way, thanks again for your efforts, I very much appreciated reading your thoughts.
April 29th, 2009 on 10:08 am
Comment Luv is one of the best plugin,should be installed by default
wordpress´s last blog post..La fete aux backlinks