FiddyP

I checked my stats just now and my jaw dropped, after just over 1 year of blogging, I have finally gone past the million hits a month mark!

I’ve also noticed my Alexa rank go to lower and lower numbers over the past few weeks too. As I write this it is at 61,627 which puts me in the top 7000 websites in the UK. rule brittania!!

It looks as though not much has changed in the way of which posts are most popular, just how much more traffic they get.

I think it’s time I released a new plugin. It’ll be the contest notify one that you might see drop down on this post. It frees a spot for a featured post and allows you to continue writing posts without worrying about dropping the contest post too far down the screen so it doesn’t get enough attention.

Hopefully that can take me up a few more hits or so!

Take a look at the screenshot of my current stats page below.. (continue reading…)

While I was at the Alexa page today, I noticed that John Cow has done something very clever, he made a picture parody of a Facebook page called “pensionbook” and it has received a massive amount of traffic over the past month. Check out his stats for the site that hosts the image (johncow.us)

Because of this traffic, his site got listed on the “movers and shakers” part of Alexa. Moving from a rank of 511,000 to 20,000 since the beginning of December. The root of Johncow.us has an image showing a template for sale image. Click through and you get the option of buying a basic version with links to johncow intact or pay a premium to have it without the links.

A pretty awesome pre-planned traffic attack! This is a really good example of monetizing a social bait page, he must have sold quite a few templates!

Unfortunately there are already people who are offering to provide the template for free (but not for long!)

My own Alexa rank has dropped below the 100K barrier now, sweet! For the UK it is below 8000, haha! and with over 50,000 unique visitors in through the doors before Christmas, all my traffic targets have been achieved. By March next year, I’d like to have over 100,000 more visitors and have my Alexa rank down to less than 50k.

I have a pretty good idea how I’m going to proceed, I have some wicked plans for CommentLuv, contests, tutorials and ebooks that will be fun to try. Roll on 2008!

I hope to see all my good blogging buddies rocking on through the new year, see you then!

I’ve seen quite a few blogs using CommentLuv now which is fantastic and I see a lot of comments about blog authors finding more great blogs by following the links to the last blog post but, I see some places not picking up everyones last post because their hosting does not allow Curl commands which is what I use for parsing the comment authors page, they can still use the fetch_rss() function so I have created some external hosting for a script that takes a URL, parses that page and outputs a feed with the location of the feed.

I’ve added a bit to the plugin that calls that external file if the hosting it is installed on doesn’t allow Curl commands, it can read the result because it doesn’t need to open it as a file using file and fopen commands.

I have found it is quicker to parse the users page first rather than try all the combinations of the default locations because each try can take up to 5 seconds (or whatever you put as the MAGPIE_TIMEOUT) which isn’t ideal. Now with the option of every blog being able to parse the users page first it shouldn’t take too long and because the rss functions of wordpress uses a cache when it reads a feed, when someone comes back and writes another comment on your blog, the plugin will use the location it found last time because it will be stored as a feed in the cache. yey!

I’ve also added a check box to allow the user to not add their last blog post, this is if you want to leave a comment asking a splog that is using commentluv to stop scraping your content (you wouldn’t want to leave a link to your blog on a splog) or if you are commenting on your own blog from elsewhere without being logged on and don’t want your last post shown.

I’ve made it easier to change the message that is displayed below the comment form too. Just edit the bit in the quotes in the source code below the changelog.

The Future
I am in the middle of learning event listeners so I can really cut the time down for parsing the page by doing it AJAX style after the user has entered their blog url and clicks to the comment area to make their entry. This should make CommentLuv almost completely transparent and prevent any longer than necessary waits after submitting the comment.

I imagine that will be after Christmas as well as adding language support and it’s own options page. I have purposely kept away from using extra tables in the WP database because, A) I don’t want to mess up an existing database, B) I haven’t used MySQL before, and C) I don’t know how! (yet)

Much later than that, I want to create a widget style box for displaying links to your commenters posts (Cliq style). I am sure I can add Gravatars to it too but that will require storing the last blog posts in the database in their own table.

You can download version 0.997 of CommentLuv here (one-click installer plugin users can use this link http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/commentluv.zip)

AJAX tutorials

Tutorial 4 is ready and will be published tomorrow. I have seen quite a few hits coming in for them so I have spent a bit more time trying to add some graphical explanations for each process in the script to make it a little easier to follow. I have part 5 all planned out so that part 6 can see you creating your own AJAX scripts. Maybe some homework assignments to send out?

Alexa Ranking

I am pleased to see my traffic going up a bit each week. The largest referrer is Stumbleupon with a steady stream of hits coming in as well as a few sharks fin spikes in my stats. I think that has helped with me getting close to the sub 100,000 mark for my alexa rank which, today is at 106,955. For just the sites visited by UK users, I am very close to being in the top 10,000 visited sites. (I can see it now, “FiddyP makes it to the top 10⁴ UK sites”)

Happy Hanuka/Christmas/Holidays/Eed Al-Adha (delete as appropriate)!