CommentLuv is now released to the Codex and is officially at final version 2.1. All beta testers need to upgrade their beta plugins because the remote files have changed…

Here’s a list of all the beta testers who helped get CommentLuv to version 2.1 and their allocated numbers for entry into the contest to win the 100$ … if any of their first 3 numbers match the bonus number drawn this Saturday 27th September on the UK Saturday Lotto Draw then they win 100$!

Here’s the twist for all you testers, you have all got 1 number shared with one other person and if it’s that number that wins, you both win 100$ each!!! OMG!!

Good luck everyone and thanks so much for the feedback and help…

You will need to make sure you have CommentLuv version 2.1 running and working on your blog by the draw date to qualify for the prize!

Yan from
http://thoushallblog.com/ was talking about 10 plugins to install
has 1,2,3 and 43 as extra

Sunil from
http://www.bloggerslab.com/ was talking about Great plugins to build a community
has 4,5,6 and 43 as extra

Suzanne from
http://dotcommogul.net/ was talking about flipping out
has 7,8,9 and 44 as extra

David from http://www.yogamatsclothesdvds.com/ was talking about Listening to yoga music
has 10,11,12 and 44 as extra

Dragon Blogger from
http://www.dragonblogger.com/ was talking about how to fix your blogs 404 page
has 13,14,15 and 45 as extra

Lyman Reed from
http://freepdmaterial.com/ was talking about A free PDF for Self Empowerment
has 16,17,18 and 45 as extra

Larry from
http://www.larryhnetka.com/wordpress/ was talking about being On the Road again
has 19,20,21 and 46 as extra

Sire from
http://wassupblog.com/ was talking about Joining the F Group
has 22,23,24 and 46 as extra

Anti Scams Product Reviews from
http://www.antiscams.info/ was talking about the Mona Vie Scam
has 25,26,27 and 47 as extra

Witchypoo from
http://psychicgeek.com/ was talking about Anxiety
has 28,29,30 and 47 as extra

Minadin from
http://www.wheresmydrink.com/ was talking about Sniper in the left tower!
has 31,32,33 and 48 as extra

Chas from
http://www.creative-lifestyles.com/ was talking about Fear of Food
has 34,35,36 and 48 as extra

Rhys from
http://biznz.org/ was talking about Hosting from Hell
has 37,38,39 and 49 as extra

Tata from
http://www.imnotbeautifullikeyou.com/ was talking about Work and Play
has 40,41,42 and 49 as extra

You can download the very latest version at the WordPress Plugin Repository for CommentLuv

On the off chance that the winner doesn’t qualify for the prize because they haven’t got version 2.1 installed and working at the time of the draw then their extra number partner gets their numbers too (so you could potentially win 200$)

You have 4 days to get version 2.1 installed and working, please let me know if you need help to get it working. It should go through ok once you check your settings page after install.

Thanks to all the beta testers of CommentLuv, release 13 is the most stable and compatible version yet. I don’t wanna tempt fate but if everything works as well ‘out there’ as it does on my test machines and servers then it will be updated on the codex so everyone will get notified of the new version and we can all start seeing it spread to the existing v1.99 blogs.

I’ve been deep in code and frantically checking each and every site that has activated the beta version and in nearly all cases have managed to see the plugin working on those who’ve tried it.

I have a small tradition I like to do when I’m deep in a project and that’s to not shave from when I start it to when I feel comfortable that there’s only cosmetic changes to come.

here’s me before I started coding this new version and site

and this is me after using my awesome Wilkinson Sword quatro with beard trimmer (6th week without changing a blade and beard trimming twice a week) that cost a measly 3.50GBP best.razor.ever!

and another looking more serious…

hurray, smooth skin means success in something. I must admit that I like the bristles, they give me something other than a cigarette to fiddle with while I’m thinking. My missus likes them too

There have been a couple of sites that required me to change the plugin code but mostly this was to make it compatible with other not-so-well-behaving ajax scripts and wotnot. This new version takes out the onsubmit event altogether which makes things much less prone to being tripped up by other scripts that listen to the comment form (ajax preview, threaded comments). You can download it in the usual place or click here

Happy commenting, please give it a test here. I tried every combination of error, not found, blank result, resubmitted comment and mess up I could and it seemed ok.

What I need

I need some help to get CommentLuv through it’s last hoop before I can release it to the world at large and my deadline for that is 25th September 2008 – the last day to enter a plugin for the WordPress MU Plugin Contest

That’s where (I hope) you come in. I have the plugin working nicely on a few blogs and the click tracking and stats are showing results for my wee group of test beds but I need a larger scale test… I’ve removed all the bugs that I can see and I’m confident that it wont do any damage because it doesn’t touch the database and most of the work is done on the client side through javascript.

The only interaction it has with the wordpress code is to listen for a single post action, if it’s a single post it puts the correct javascript in the header and that’s it. The majority of the code is the settings page and action hook code.

What you could get

Money! I’ll tell you about the money now before you get bored and miss the rest
$100 dollars by Paypal (or equivalent prize in Amazon or other voucher of your choice) for some lucky person who helps me over the next few days to a week by doing the things detailed below. The winner will be decided by the randomness of the UK lottery on Saturday 26th (1 day after the guaranteed 100 Million Euromillions jackpot which must be won!). I’ll split up the 49 numbers available equally (yes I know 49 doesn’t divide well unless it’s a 7 but we’ll work something out) between everyone and publish them at 6pm, whoever gets a match with the bonus number drawn wins the moolah.

Not just that, part of this is making and receiving comments to see if it behaves on a large scale and for that there will be a list of all those participating viewable only to those participating where you can find blogs that give 10x the luv (see how below) which will increase your traffic/readership/luv rating and more! (obviously, this needs a few people to help, I can’t do it with just 5!)

The technical bits ( )

Don’t worry! it’s not hard, just as easy as installing a plugin and registering your url with the hub site (and dancing naked in the rain).

it goes like this…

For people with WordPress own hosted blogs only

1

Download the beta of CommentLuv (version 10 pre final) and Install.

Download CommentLuv (right click and copy url to use the one click plugin updater if you use it)

If you already have CommentLuv please deactivate it first and then upload the commentluv folder overwriting the existing one and activate it in the dashboard plugins page. Go straight to the commentluv settings page under settings/commentluv and see the bit at the bottom about entering your field ID’s (it sounds nastier than it is).

You can see in your theme’s comments.php what your comment form uses for identifying the form, the name field, the url field and the comment input area. If it uses ID= then use that in the settings or if it uses name= ,enter the value in the settings page and choose “name” as the type.

There are some screenshots here at the Ajax CommentLuv Plugin page over at CommentLuv.com

It sometimes works right out the box because the default ID’s I put in there have worked on a few blogs without any need for changing. It depends on who designed your theme. Other ways to find out are to click and drag over your comment form while you are logged out of your blog and view the selection source (in firefox) or use the developer toolbar to show form information.

2

Register your url at CommentLuv.com

Pop over to my sister site CommentLuv.com and register like you would with any normal WordPress blog. Activate your registration and visit the settings page (http://www.commentluv.com/settings) whilst logged on.

There you can register your blog URL (preferably where you’ll be installing the plugin) and you will be given some code to display a verification image on your blog home page (the page pointed to by the URL you register). Once you place the code on your site you can come back to the settings page at commentluv.com and click “verify”. The site will then visit your url and look for the code.

If all goes well and it can see your site and verification it will be ready to rok (so it says)

Set your feed cache age and if you want see if it can find your feed automatically. If it can’t then you can enter it in manually if you like (although it all works better if your site has an autofindable feed which is standard in wordpress blogs)

Check for your Commentluv member ID and enter it in the box located on the plugin settings page on your blog dashboard, check that click tracking is enabled (ticked) and update your settings.

3

Register at the support forum

yes I know there’s a whole lorra registering going on but they’re all under one roof and not with any shady company and it’s all to do with CommentLuv. There you’ll be able to report any errors or suggestions and I wont need to use some sort of mass email script and email people all the time. gosh I love forums and blogs! emailing is a right pain in the arsebone. I just cannae be bothered with it!, I hate saying the same things and giving the same answers over and over again (except giving links to pages that say the things I’ve said over and over again) but… anyhoooooo

Done!

All that’s left to do is use commentluv by visiting the the blogs who use the new version and see how it plays with others. Return to the CommentLuv site often and see if the stats make sense for what you’re seeing yourself and report any anomalies or strange behaviour at the forum.

Because I will be releasing this to the plugin contest I would love for you to love it and vote for it when the time comes, it might get some more exposure and I’ll be sure to have a permanent part of the about page showing links to the people who help. New users will want to start using the plugin when it’s final as soon as possible and the links page would be a perfect place for them to start clicking through to ajax commentluv enabled blogs. (that could be you!)

Please leave a comment here or at the forum to say you’re participating

The Links:
CommentLuv Beta plugin file
CommentLuv.com hub site
FiddyP Support Forum

I have a head full of ideas on what to do with CommentLuv and I’m pleased how it has come so far but I think I’m in danger of feature creep with the addition of the click tracking function. I think I shall keep this off by default and label it experimental.

I think CommentLuv is useful for quite a few reasons, one of them is finding great blogs from the interesting title under their comments and it’s nice to see a connection between commenters (I know it’s commentators but you know what I mean). I really would like to see the stats for how many blogs have reciprocal commenters and how man blogs share commenters. That would be really interesting to see, the raw data I am getting now is interesting but when I get a good interface for displaying it then it will be really interesting in w00t kind of way.

I have a busy week ahead and I know I was supposed to release the stable version this weekend but I think there are very few little things left to fix and maybe I can go ahead with the full version next week.

In the meantime, you can download the very latest version which appears to be going quite well here

Download Beta

now compatible with Brians Threaded Comments

Just deactivate the old one, upload the new one overwriting the folder and then activate again. Please check the settings page in the dashboard/settings/commentluv and of course let me know if you get any problems.

Oh the fun of creating new things!!! I’ve had the time of my coding life over the past few weeks while I develop the 2.0 version of CommentLuv.

It’s took me to the sites for jQuery, Mysql, php, wordpress and others a million times and I’ve learned tons from my toe dipping into mysql and seeing just how many requests are sent to my server…

I can’t wait to show you what is happening to what started off as a simple WordPress only plugin!

Here’s the list of changes for the upcoming 2.0 loveliness .

The Plugin

• Runs with jQuery
  This will help an awful lot to combat the automated spam comment scripts. Because the plugin is activated and displayed using javascript, the remote script wont get called by people posting directly to the comments file or for Curl’ing scripts. I’m happy with that!
• Runs with AJAX
  This makes it much faster, it wont add any load on the hosting server because all the fetching is done client side and it’s all done while the visitor is typing their comment.
• Link Tracking
  Track which of your comments get the last blog post clicked, see what post titles work best for you
• Works with registered users and on WordPress MU
  Now blogs with ‘register to comment’ restrictions can use the plugin. It’s also compatible with WordPress MU which opens up a whole new section of bloggers.
• Theoretically compatible with more than just blogs or wordpress
  Because it uses javascript only, it opens the plugin up to any blog that allows the user to add code to the head of their template. This even opens it up to places like forums and simple guest books. Work will start on other platforms as soon as the 2.0 final is out
• Free Support Site
  CommentLuv.com is a support site where I can provide lots of cool extras that you just can’t get with the current commentluv plugin. It only takes a moment to register a site and afterwards you get a whole heap of cool things (see The Site below)
• It looks pretty!
• Language support
  I’ve added the code for language support, there is a German language file coming soon as well as Hebrew and Chinese
• It’s FREE
  I’m not a big corporation, I’m just one guy with too much pc time on his hands. If the site gets a lot of traffic, I might make some money on adspace or I might not. It doesn’t matter, I have felt a great sense of fun and satisfaction from creating this plugin and site and find it really helps me to learn new programming languages and methods to have a project that continues to challenge me it’s also nice when people say how cool I am for creating a plugin

Advantages of registering your site for free at the CommentLuv.com site

• Choose from your last 10 posts instead of just the one when you comment on CL blogs
• Faster retrieval of your posts for your registered URL
• Choose your cache time for even speedier return of links
• Change your feed address
  Useful if you want to register a domain that has no feed of it’s own so you can use blogs with KeywordLuv to point to your business domain with keywords and also have a titled link to it’s/your associated blog.
• Default link and anchor text
  Set it so the plugin returns a link to a particular page on any site when you comment on CL blogs using your normal domain name as URL. This is particularly useful if you want to promote a post that isn’t on your last 10 posts or promote a splash page or if your blog is offline.
• Statistics
  By being registered, you get your sites comments that get a commentluv link and all the comments you make on other CL blogs stored which will enable the site to show you where you’ve commented and if they’ve commented on you.

  Other great stats will be things like, your most advertised blog post, your most frequented blog, your most commented post, the top commentluv receiving commentator and so on. I am working on some pretty hardcore things that will create a ‘map’ type network for you to look at that shows how your own personal ‘comment web’ grows.

• A place to report spam
  If you find a particular url is spamming yours and/or your friends site then this can be dealt with at source, enough reports of a spammer will see them removed from CommentLuv and no blog using it will display their last post so it benefits everyone, when a spammer knows that no CommentLuv enabled blog will show their last post, they’ll stop using those sites to spam their crap.
• Featured sites
  Every week will be a new CommentLuv enabled site featured bringing fame and fortune to the blog owner. It will be on the first page and (if all goes well with traffic) should get a fair amount of click-thrus
• CommentLuv directory
  Add keywords and a description to your site and users will be able to browse through different categories to find what they’re after. This could increase your traffic and commentators (and spammers I suppose but see above about reporting spam) immensely
• Support
  One stop shop for questions and feature requests
• Exclusivity
  Enable CommentLuv only for registered users. Could be useful if you’re finnicky with giving out links
• Contests!!
  I’ve been wanting to do this for a long time but I didn’t have the resources in place. I’d love to have random ‘spot’ prize winners, all someone (registered user) has to do is comment on a registered CommentLuv enabled blog and they could win a cool gadget or Amazon voucher or paypal payment.

  The great thing is, the blog owner wins too! This could really encourage comments for blog owners and they also get to win something too. Rules will be simple, a winner will know they’ve won because instead of their last blog post coming back, a winners message will be there. They’ll have to claim the prize on the blog that they won it on so the blog owner gets return visitors who participate in the discussion.

Summary

So, that’s it (for now). Some of these changes are already live and others will be phased in as and when I am happy that each new addition is working well. I should have the stable beta release of the new plugin by the end of the weekend. Once that’s out and doing well, all the rest of the stuff can be worked on with the site without having to change the plugin. I might even get it done in time for entry into the WordPress MU plugin contest.

Once the stable version goes to a full 2.0 final, I will slowly phase out the remote scripts for the existing commentluv. In the past 8 days, the remote script has been hit over half a million times! lots of those are unnecessary spam hits but it still handles tens and tens of thousands of last blog posts every single day so I will have to handle the handover gently!

It amazes me how long someone will wait to upgrade a plugin or wordpress because they feel FTP is too intimidating to try and do it themselves. It’s a normal thing though I suppose, wordpress is so easy to use that just about anyone can get a blog up and running with very little knowledge. I hope WP2.7 comes with a browsable plugin directory from the dashboard with automatic plugin upgrades and installation to make things easier.

You can register your site already at the CommentLuv.com site and be one of the first to be able to choose from your last 10 posts on the sites that install the new version. It’s already live here and at commentluv.com and a few beta testers sites (see previous post). It’s free to register and easy to verify your site with the automated process on the settings page once you’re logged on.

I must say thanks to the following people who have helped me get the Ajax version of CommentLuv to an installable beta state…

1. tata from imnotbeautifullikeyou.com who was the very first blog to have a installable plugin of ACL – thanks so much for the repeated re-install of the plugin to get it to a semi-working state, it really helped having you reply so quickly
2. Pacuraru Ovidiu from Zice.ro for checking for compatibility with Mu.
3. Jon from Beauty Salon Marketing for finding the kinky slash that threw a spanner in the works. (spanner removed!)
4. Byteful Traveller from Byteful Blog for making the fine looking badge used on the bottom of the comment form

I put the link to the beta version as a reply to a comment on a post from a few days ago and it’s been downloaded nearly 50 times! Either some people are lurking in the background or someone is click happy!

The new version of the Ajax CommentLuv plugin and supporting site are still in early beta but do seem to work. There’s probably some i’s to dot and t’s to cross but that’s what beta releases are all about!

The major feature is it finds the post while the visitor is typing their comment which speeds up comment posting and reduces load on the server as it’s all done on the browser side. It’ll reduce the load on my server to because it’s called with javascript and most ‘bots don’t parse that.

If you feel like being a bit of a tester, here’s the temporary download link. Please give your comments in the support forum if you have issues and I’ll do my best to fix any errors as and when they come.

I’ve been working on the AJAX version of commentluv for quite a while, I think I have it working ok enough for it to do it’s dry run on a blog. The functionality is fine, I just have to work on the details so it can be installed easily as a plugin.

Now, when you start to type your comment it will go off and fetch your last posts from the feed found at the URL given. It even allows you to choose which of your posts you want included.

It’s still pretty new and a bit clunky but it seems to do the job, if you’re having any issues with it please let me know!