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.

I’ve got so many bloody projects on the go that they’ve all stopped!

Here’s a list for future me to read to feel the future shame..

06 Nov *edit* made some progress!

1. Intense Debate Commentluv
   • I need to split up the css so it’s in a separate file
   • I need to add a check for existence of jquery at the start and load it if not already loaded
   • I need to pretty up the extra url field
   • I need to hide the existing url field on a logged out form and populate it with the value in the one I added with the script
2. Premium Support page
   • Create the different charge bands
   • Create paypal buttons with IPN url
   • Create said IPN receiving script
   • Integrate it with the comluv affiliate plugin for paying referral site
3. Premium Extras
   • Create different charge groups
   • Create paypal buttons
   • Create IPN receiving script
   • Integrate said script with affiliate payment
4. Referral contest
   • Work out the prizes
   • Type up the description post
   • Set up a single area for entries

That’ll do for now, there’s more but I’m getting depressed

Hurray! I have been able to do some stuff that wasn’t directly related to the API or backend code for the ComLuv database! This Monday has been an awesome day for productivity.

I have fixed the errant phpmyadmin on my plesk server so I can view my massive innoDB database. (and make backups)

I added a plugin to make adding youtube videos much easier to a ComLuv blog post.

I implemented a site wide footer text links box on the network.

I added a new widget to allow Comluv blog owners to become an affiliate to sell those ads.

I edited every single themes footer to make sure it all worked hunky dorey.

I wrote a “spoonfed” tutorial to show people how to make money with their comluv blog.

I answered ALL support tickets and resolved them.

I got fiddyp back up and running!! Some DNS issues were making it a bit invisible but a quick change of my DNS A records means I’ve got a place to ramble again.

Yey for me. I feel awesome enough to take the rest of the day off

I managed to catch the Monday night elottery broadcast today and although I’ve heard the business presentation a squillion times, I actually got excited about elottery again!

I’ve been involved with it for a few years now and even though I continue to bring in new members here and there, they are mostly from my total leads orders and my automated sites and autoresponders. I rarely get the chance to do a face to face presentation these days which is probably due to most face to face meetings I have are talking about 10k+ commercial contracts and it seems a little bit out of place to be mentioning something that costs a fiver to join!

My mistake! I used to do it before and successfully signed up a professional football club who have just recently been promoted up a league and will soon have television coverage (and lucky me has a big grab a grand banner behind the goal!) so I think it’s time to start back on the elottery trail again. I did really well last time I was active with elottery and my team hasn’t depleted much in the months and months of neglect that I have inflicted on them, combine this with the new payplan and structure that has come about because of… COMPLIANCE… and I’m 100% positive that I’ll be earning more than ever (I’ve earned literally tens of thousands of pounds in commission from elottery so far)

What is this compliance thing?
It’s due to new European law coming in to force about networking and other commission based opportunities..

This is the best news I have heard for elottery since I joined because…

• no longer is it necessary for an affiliate to be a player
• the opening up of commission levels is no longer dependent on how many affiliates you sign up
• getting bonus payments has been made much much easier
• no more freeloaders

These are just some of the benefits of the new rules coming and I will be expanding on these over the next few weeks, for now, get yourself over to my elottery site and take a look around. Now is the time to join elottery, it’ll be even easier to make a success of yourself! (with my help of course!)

Hurrah! another Euromillions rollover which means there’s an easy peasy way for you to win a set of iPod portable speakers just by leaving a comment on this post…(retail value 59.99GBP / 120USD)

Give me your guess for the two lucky star numbers in a comment here and if you guess the two correct numbers between 1 and 9 for this Fridays’ Euromillions draw, you win!

Check out these awesome speakers…

The contest is open to everyone worldwide and finishes on Friday 4th April so get your guesses in now…(you don’t even have to pay for postage)

About Euromillions

A rollover happens quite regularly on the Euromillions and is worth millions of tax free lump sum money!, you’ll have a much better chance to win a prize if you play in a syndicate with elottery because we guarantee that your syndicate will match both lucky star numbers on every single draw!!! Have a browse of my elottery site to see how we can make this promise…

Just a little update on how things are going in FiddyP land…

I have been taken on as a director in another company which splits me up even more so I have been unable to put much time into new tutorials for here. I have tried to keep up with the comments and do visit the blogroll a couple times per week (sorry I can’t comment most times everyone!). I’ll be making a post or two about what I’ve been doing commercially when the projects are at the 60% and beyond stage.

Contests

These are easy to post and pretty easy to manage so we’ll keep up with them! There seems to be a regular supply of Euromillions rollovers so I will keep the contest to win the Vmoda headphones for each rollover that happens. They only run for a few days and the winner is the person who successfully picks both lucky star numbers in the comment of the post.

I do have some fantastic plans for a contest that will be unlike (m)any other(s). Keep an eye out for that, I came up with the idea a while ago and it’s only now that I have the wonga to throw at it. It’s gonna be great!

uVme

I have had some fun working out some strategies for the different uVme games. I created a simple splash page for my imgames website which will be pointed to from a few different flash game type sites and sources. I like to have a quick go on darts or sudoku as a free game when I get a few minutes and see if I can send a challenge to any new player signups.

I will be offering a free fiver to people that join through my link soon. The idea is, you sign up and credit your account with a fiver (dollars, pounds or euros) and when you create a fiver worth of play then I send you your fiver back so you don’t actually have to spend the whole fiver, just create a fiver’s worth of play (if you play 10 games at 1/2 a $/£/E and win every one of them, you’ll have 7.50 $/£/E PLUS another 5 $/£/E)

Shop

The FiddyP postage shop should be getting some more listings soon too, I have a fair bit of stock to shift and as soon as I get a half a minute I’ll start putting item descriptions up. There will be an affiliate option too so you can link to the shop and get 15% commission on everything someone buys after using your link!

If there’s anything else you’d like to see here just leave a comment….

Quick contest below!…

This Friday there is a massive SUPER jackpot of 95,000,000 GBP !!

That’s massively Gi-Normous!! I’ve already got an edge because I play through elottery which has been giving me an average of 2 wins per week since I started. I have a post somewhere on my old blog that recorded every time I won during a 3 month period and it went on down the page for ages!

I can’t imagine what I would do with so much money, I’m sure it wouldn’t change me (yeah right!). All I ask is the chance to prove that money wouldn’t change me

There’s a much better chance of me winning through elottery because my multiple free syndicates all have a guarantee that BOTH lucky star numbers will be matched for every draw and winning with just 5 matches is a lot easier than with 5 and 2 lucky stars…. it’s like, almost guaranteed to win something this week!

If you’re from the USA, you can’t enter because it’s Euro peeps only and it’s illegal for U.S. banks to allow transfer to gambling sites outside the country BUT, you CAN enter the FiddyP version on this post (read below). The rest of the world can enter through my elottery site and stand a much better chance of winning with one of our syndicates…(you can enter the contest here too)

Some things I would like to do if I had the money:

• Build a Buddhist Temple in London
• Build schools in Africa and other underprivileged places and pay for people to learn teaching skills to go over there and teach
• Build some wicked good houses way outside London and live in a different one each week
• Start a multitude of businesses and give them to my friends and family
• Pay for an advert on every TV channel to show my naked arse (ok so this one isn’t serious!)
• Buy some biscuits…(see above)

Quick Contest

To add to the excitement, I am going to run a very short contest on this post and you need to leave a comment to be entered.

The Euromillions works by matching 5 numbers between 1 and 50 plus two lucky star numbers between 1 and 9 (different numbers).

You can win these sexy headphones from Vmoda if you leave a comment on this post and include your guess of 2 different numbers between 1 and 9. If anyone can match both numbers with the actual draw this Friday 8th Feb 2008 (you can see up to the minute results on the sidebar) then you win the headphones!

If there is more than one winner….. then EVERYONE that matches both of their numbers with the lucky star numbers will win a set. You can be from anywhere in the world and I will pay for postage and insurance to get them to you as quick as possible.

This contest couldn’t be more easier (or shorter! LOL) so get your guesses in as soon as you see this and tell as many people as possible!

• You can enter the Euromillions with one of my magical syndicates at my elottery site
• You can still enter the iPod speakers contest which is open for another 2 and bit weeks

OK I admit, it wasn’t a ‘real’ game but it was great fun nonetheless (love that triple word!). uVme has now gone into soft launch so anyone can join as an associate which I did today. While I was waiting for the information to go through, I decided to put a tenner in my players account and see how I could do with some real money games.

Last time I played on the beta site I was quite good at the darts game so I thought I’d wager fiddyp on a game and got a really good score! I was almost nervous while I waited to see what the other player scored and… per-ching! it popped up a few thousand less! I got my fiddyp pack and half of their wager too. yey!

The uVme coders changed the playing format slightly since the beta testing, now instead of aiming, clicking to start the power meter and then clicking again to try and hit the middle (like a golf swing type of game), it is now aim, hold click to start power meter and release the button to throw the dart. The first couple of throws I did I didn’t realize that it was like this and by pure chance the amount of time it took my finger to linger on the button to click and release was just enough to hit the middle of the power button!
As long as you’re aiming in the treble and you hit the middle of the power button, you get the treble and can skip ahead a few numbers on the ’round the clock’ game. I thought I would try a free game (you don’t have to wager) and found quickly that it’s all in the rythm, I got a cracking score and managed to clear the board in only 15 throws and hit the bullseye first time of trying.

Sweet, now to try for 2 quid…

It seems the bigger the wager, the more pressure there is! I totally lost it half way through and ended up with a sub-par score and lost my wager It was bloody good fun though and for someone that doesn’t really play games, I had a great time.

I’ll have to keep an eye out for a Chinese player that’s already become (in)famous on the site, last week he was able to rack up over a thousand quid ($2000+) in wager winnings starting from just a small stake. That’s something that’ll develop more and more, just like going on Xbox Live for the first time – you realize that there some awfully good players out there! At least there’s the option to play for free so I can practice a bit more before wagering a whole two quid next time…

You can join for free and play some free games to see if it’s going to be worth the inevitable hype here

+=£££?

I tried out some affiliate links and reviews on this blog before and even just a couple of reviews had click thru’s that ended in purchases. My review of my Three Skype Phone has generated 30 quid in commission so far (60 USD) and my Tefal Quick Cup Review had 7 purchases. Google adsense isn’t very prevalent, I put a block on some of the popular posts and a small banner below the related links on a single post. That’s not brought in very much at all so I think I’ll chuck that out eventually.

Instead of affiliate links, I’ve decided to start selling some items on this blog, it’s getting a fair bit of UK traffic and I have a good source of stock from an auction and a ‘job-lot’ selection of electronic things. Some were a bit useless but there are some good portable speakers and headphones in there that should sell. My missus wants to try selling some items too, she does some wonderful Chinese characters for good luck sayings and traditional charms which look wicked good in a wooden frame.

I’m going to use the WordPress shopping cart plugin from Instinct because it allows you to start small. You don’t have to go to great lengths to setup an entire themed site like you would with ZenCart or oScommerce scripts. I can set up the plugin and add just one product within a couple of hours. Probably even quicker but I’m such a tweaker that I can’t help try every combination of option!

I think it’s worth a go, I’ve got a company that I could use the stock for but I think seeing as I bought this myself and not through my company, I can have an experiment to see if any of it can move through here, I’d be interested to hear about any of your experiences if you have sold items direct from your own blog or site. (a chance to plug your site in the comments if you do!)

My blog name kind of works nicely into this idea it’s a nice memorable name just on it’s own but to add a memory hook to it I am pretty sure I’ll be doing UK postage at FiddyP (50p) for any item regardless of size, this makes it much easier for a buyer to know how much they’ll pay at the checkout as well as being the theme of the site. oh how convenient!
Of course, all the regular stuff will be going on as well like the AJAX tutorials, other hand step throughs and whatever else happens in my head which I think is worth sharing..

I’m working all weekend so I’ll get on with it and see if I can’t have my first product on sale by Tuesday.. yey!

I, for some reason, have a subscription to T3 magazine. I think I must have crumbled under the power of one of Future Publishing’s telesales reps and agreed to try a few issues for 1p, now I have a direct debit and get the magazine delivered monthly. It’s not bad though and there’s always something to read when I need a poo (sorry! it’s true though).

I was going to download and edit pictures of their fantasy Christmas presents and do my own write up but, I have been playing with Amazons widgets and came up with this.. it’s pretty clever and easy to build..

Amazon.co.uk Widgets

Not bad for a few minutes work, I think I can work on this some more, combining it with some decent write-ups and other value added information and it will look at home within a post and provide convenient links to the products.

I think this post still needs it’s own pictures and descriptions for the gadgets as well as the slideshow box, what do you think?