It’s been almost a week where I haven’t been coding anything for longer than an hour without the computer crashing with weird little squares all over the screen.

I think it has to do with my integrated graphics card (Radeon HD 3300) . I have gone through all the usual steps of updating drivers, bios, firmware and wotnot and I am waiting for the next crash.

It’s been hard because I need to code some major things for the ComLuv site and every time I get deep into it, the bloody pc crashes! It’s doubly hard because I have so many great things to watch and listen to on these awesome monitors and 5.1 speakers and I can’t because a little bit of media is liable to make the screen freeze with little squares corrupting it.

Big mofo list

I’ve got a fair bit of stuff to do for the ComLuv network, it’s kind of like the washing up. The longer you leave it, the less likely you are to do it… imagine a big pile of washing up and then imagine that the kitchen crashes every time you run the water. That’s me that is. boo hoo

If my latest open heart procedures on my hardware can keep the system up without pissing it’s pants when an mp3 gets played, I can move on to what I was doing before all this crashing malarky. Which is..

1st priority: Get the url registration page working with a new look and form validation. (seriously, I don’t know how people keep putting http://http:// in their url field!)

2nd priority: Update the WP commentluv plugin with these new things:

• update the settings page to look real nice
  I’m doing this with a plugin framework that takes care of all the settings page bumph so I can easily make it a lot more intuitive to use.
• Allow CSS to be edited for all objects
  This seems to be an important thing to do. Rather than edit a style sheet or hunt through the code for inline styles, I will add a text input box for the different objects so (advanced) users can completely control the look of the links, badge and info box.
• Add the Russian and Chinese language files
  Awesome work from users to add even more languages to the plugin

3rd Priority: Allow more URL’s per account on ComLuv.
This was supposed to be done already but I have spent an awful lot of time on making sure the basics work properly, plus, my personal/business life has it’s own mofo lists to deal with!

4th Priority: Add a “what I’m doing” theme to ComLuv so extra features that are only available to ComLuv blog owners can be opened to all. This will be a friend feed type of affair where you can add widgets to show your stumbleupons, diggs, comments, luvlinks, link clicks etc etc.

I want this in right now but time to do it is a rarity for me these days! Having this theme will allow people who don’t necessarily want a new blog to have the extra features. It might help with links and traffic to have a site where your latest links and other social activities are chronicled and it’ll reduce the amount of empty blogs created on the network.

5th Priority: Tutorials and videos!
Lots of them.

6th Priority: Email courses.
Everything from starting blogging to running your own network to making money with a ComLuv blog (I’m itching to start this one!)

There’s loads more but it’s depressing the hell out of me listing them!

As soon as the crashing like a mofo finishes, I’ll try to get on the coding like a mofo. Stay tuned!

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

Like running and other endurance activities, programming and website creation can cause you to come up against an invisible wall now and then. Especially if you consume 3 weeks of spare time with coding and creating and supporting and marketing.

I hit a wall just the other day, I’d been at the keyboard day and night and every single spare moment available coding the recode of the API and making the new theme do what I wanted (like work on the 3 big browsers).

When I wasn’t at the pc, I was thinking, sketching and pondering about what I was due to do the next time I got near a mouse. It was just about to calm down and I got called for a filmed interview about The ComLuv Network by UKFast (my awesome hosting company) which then meant I was bound to sit at the pc for many a long hour making sure the site looked sweet and tasty in time for any screenshots or flyins for the video.

I had just managed to get it done in time and, right after the interview (which went really well!) I jumped face first into the virtual coding wall, bazoompf!

I really wanted to get on and put the new support ticket system in and add a few widgets but the wall wouldn’t let me, no matter how hard I thought about it, I just couldn’t make myself sit down and get started.

stage left: misery and mental self flagellation enters

stage right: TV saunters in

That’s right, TV. I cured my wall-ness by watching some crap TV. That’s all it took. After not watching TV for 4 months, seeing just a few hours of it left me feeling like I was completely wasting valuable time with this utter drivel.

An early night and one of those weird promise yourself mantras that I sometimes do before bed and the very next morning I was refreshed and eager to code the code again.

Now I have replaced the not-so-great support system on ComLuv with a nice shiny new one that can build up a knowledge base from the tickets supported.

sorted.

Support Tickets

I did some pretty fancy tweaking of code today to see if I can replace the support tickets system on ComLuv, the system at the moment isn’t bad but the last support ticket management software I used was far superior and allowed me to reply to closed tickets and create canned responses.

It will need some more work to integrate it into the dashboard of the site but I’m pretty confident I can do it.

Theme

I feel the need to tweak themes too, I found an old mockup image on my hard drive that I had for a client that never took up the job and I contacted someone about converting it to a WP theme. I love how it looks and I’d really like to have the format for ComLuv so I can start on tutorials and other features.

That’s not to say the current one isn’t great, it’s just that I’m all for “get it done” then “make it work” and then “make it pretty” and then “do it all again until I have what I want.

Newsletter

I had a bit of a nightmare with my newsletter software taking up too much resources while being on the same server as ComLuv so I took steps to transfer it to another server and use the ComLuv SMTP connection to do all the sending. Hopefully this will fix any issues I was seeing..

Tutorials & Videos

I have the new pc set up with a screen recorder and I have a list of videos that I’d like to produce for tutorials on the ComLuv site. I tested it out and my quad core monster can handle the capture on a widescreen so I can do HD videos and host them on Vimeo

Remote Images & Scripts

I have done some serious optimization on the blogger version of CommentLuv so that now there are very few calls to the ComLuv server for images and scripts. This one thing should dramatically decrease the server load during busy times.

Work

And now I have to tweak the system in the shop.  The tweaking never ends!

I usually spend the first part of Sunday doing the weekly books for the takeaway, it takes up most of the morning to go through each days takings and tot it up in an accounts package and check the figures off the parallel sheet. It’s a good system and helps me to know exactly where any errors have happened.

Today though, I did my usual shower, shave, coco-pops and coffee and started fiddling with some bits of the site, which took me off on many tangents of code and template glory until I had a fully moved fiddyp.co.uk on the ComLuv network and rebranded parts of the whole network to be in line with the CommentLuv feel.

6 hours I was at it! I really must get a bumper sticker ..

“WPMu admins can be at it all night”

But really, I’m having so.much.fun!

It Grows!

Looks like the network is growing rapidly and the latest version of CommentLuv hasn’t had a support ticket about a bug for the last 12,000 downloads. Can I has stable?

So far, the new API has given some luv to more than 50k comments on blogs around the world and has attracted more than 200 new blogs and hundreds more registered users. The new-started-only-last-week database has already recorded approximately 20k unique websites (those that have a feed), processed 4k info page displays and recorded over 9k clicks from users on peoples last blog/tweet/digg links.

happy boy!

It’s just starting..

There’s still a huge amount for me to do with regards to the site like adding advertising options, custom themes, editable css files, affiliate payments for selling adverts, custom text link ads and much much more. Stick around, you might see something you’d like to take advantage of. I have big plans for this network, I hope you can be part of the fun too.

Let me know if you’d like to see anything in particular on the site or in the plugin..

It’s a beautiful sunny day, it has been like this for a few days now. I haven’t seen any of it. bohoo.

but, I have been cooped up in front of two shiny monitors beavering away to bring about the launch of the new ComLuv network yey!!

I seriously need to go out and have some food and a drink, I also need to write the announcement email so I think I’ll prolly just go on up to the pub beer garden and order some fish and chips with a pint of fosters and take my laptop with me to scribe a note to all the existing members to let them know they can start using the site.

oh and I activated the new version of CommentLuv on every sub domain site too so if you want to be the first to use commentluv, get yourself a blog at ComLuv!

ETA : GMT 16:00 for all the switches to be switched on!