It’s about bloody time! The new CommentLuv plugin is out there and getting lots and lots of downloads. Over 5000 in the first week actually which is a pretty big number!

The plugin is now standalone which means it will no longer require my expensive dedicated server to work which also means there’ll be no registering to my site to add a feed url or buy additional urls and static links.

Hurray! do you know what that will do to my support tickets? it’ll virtually decimate them! No more pointing people to the member page, no more spoon feeding them their feed urls or explaining how www.something.com is different to something.com . Oh, and no more crashed server in the middle of the night due to excessive load.

Actually, it’s the excessive server load and regular crashes that motivated me to turn the whole CommentLuv thing on it’s head and make it standalone. Once I do that, I can move away from dedicated hosting and put all my sites on a VPS that is scalable, a VPS that’s a bit closer to the majority of visitors to my sites. USA! USA! USA! lol

What’s next?

Well according to the stats at WordPress.org, it takes about a month for most people to update their plugin when they get the notification in their dashboard and so when the end of the month comes around, I’ll switch off the CommentLuv API for the wordpress plugin and set it to send back a message about having to upgrade to the latest plugin.

That’s sure to piss off a few people but, seriously, I can’t keep paying for this server out of my own pocket and I just don’t have the time to maintain the server. I just wanna make plugins!

I’m itching to do a cool facebook plugin, multi author blog plugin, the premium version of CommentLuv plugin and much much more but so far, I’ve been stuck fire fighting the bloody server! time to say goodbye and within this month!

But, before that can happen

I have to transfer all my existing minor sites to the new VPS

And then, design a new theme for comluv.com which is still going to be an awesome guest blogger site with oodles of pagerank and traffic and then move that to the VPS and then code the premium commentluv and then design the site to handle the purchases and then I have to launch the premium plugin and to do that I have to make the videos and to do that….. arrrrggh!

I’ve had a blast launching the new free version of CommentLuv and it occurred to me that I haven’t actually put a feature list out there so people know what’s changed in this new version.

So, here’s what’s new :

phew! that took a while…

just you wait until you see what’s coming in CommentLuv premium!

You can Download CommentLuv here

I’ve started coding the upgrade to my CommentLuv plugin, it’s going to be called CommentLuv 3.0 (original huh?)

More features than you can shake a stick at

This time around I want to do it all again from scratch and I’ve already got a good idea of what I’m going to add to it.

• Dofollow
  Just for the last blog post link and it’ll be configurable like Lucia’s linky luv plugin
• Keyword luv (sort of)
  This will allow a registered comluv user to have their registered site name next to their real name in their comment.
• Custom CSS
  How many people have been asking for this? lol, it’ll be in the new version!
• Use the new comment meta table
  I’ll store the last blog post, user id and request id in the comment meta so the comment text doesn’t get mangled and every link will be identifiable by the info panel. no more ‘cannot find member’ messages.
• Auto registration
  Why not allow the blog that installs commentluv to click a button and be registered straight away? yey!
• Premiumness
  I would like to add premium options, one would be to allow you to give your registered users a full 10 posts to choose from when they comment.

If there’s more you want to add, let me know in the comments…

[edit] I’ve just realized, this post is number 300 on this blog. Synchronicity. mmm Yummy.

My first day off in 9 months and it turns into a sick day! OMG I am super flu’d up and my plans for sketching out the new CommentLuv have been skuppered

That's not a moon! thats the flu virus

I think I’ll have to try and do some stuff on my laptop that needs doing to the ComLuv site. Things like, a daily visit list of CommentLuv enabled sites based on the most comments received. There are other maintenance tasks I have to do but that’ll take my main pc and it’s bloody cold in my computer room!

Not quite like this but nearly!

Seriously! it’s right cold oop North. Couple that with the fact that the flat above the takeaway has single pane glass in the windows and the one in my computer room has a broken latch which prevents it from closing and you’ve got a perfect recipe for bloody freezing!

All my development work has grinded to a halt because of this cold weather and with it being Christmas and we’re one less chef in the kitchen, there is a huge amount of work to be done in the offline world of a Chinese takeaway. I felt quite stressed in the beginning of this period where I couldn’t get any coding done but rather than get emotionally damaged by the pressure of all this code and web stuff, I decided to just concentrate on what is paying the bills and supporting the family for a bit.

There’s no real problems with CommentLuv at the moment, it’s working on WP2.9 and the ComLuv site is surviving and only just now starting to make some pennies with adsense and kontera so hopefully, nothing major will happen between now and spring so I can start some serious coding again. Pah, who am I kidding? I wont be able to last until spring! lol, guess I’ll have to take another unpaid day away when I’m better just so I can exercise my brain.

Now back to my snot filled hankies. where the hell does all this snot come from? something must be losing out on liquids in my body so all this snot can be produced. bleurgh

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!

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 happening, it’s really going on right this minute. The new CommentLuv site and plugin are literally 2 weeks away (sooner for some).

I’ve made an announcement on the main CommentLuv site and suspended member registrations until all the existing subscribers and members have been imported to the new site. I will try and move everything else without causing any major disruption to normal use.

This is the culmination of 2 years worth of updates, improvements and masses of new learnings. I was able to bring commentluv up from a humble wordpress only plugin to a combined site and multi-platform utility that got used by thousands of blog owners and (literally) millions of people every month felt a little bit of luv.

Now, CommentLuv is used on WordPress, Blogger, Jskit, Haloscan and more will come when I release details of the API . When that happens, there wont be a commenting system out there that I wont try to code a CommentLuv plugin for! I’m sure there are some geeks out there that’ll be able to use the API to create their own versions for whatever platform they can imagine too so the chances are that if you didn’t have CommentLuv before, you will be able to get it soon!

Some Fancy Features

Free WordPress 2.7.1 Blog with plugins
Every single existing and future member of CommentLuv will be able to create their own WordPress 2.7.1 blog with plugins like CommentLuv already installed. All will be hosted on the new server and all will be free for any member to use!

Multiple Sources
You will be able to register up to 5 sites with your account and retrieve posts from any and all of them when you comment on CommentLuv sites

Premium Features
As well as the whole host of blogging tools available for free, there will be some fantastic features such as a full newsletter/autoresponder package that can be integrated into your blog to provide feed subscriptions, newsletters, broadcasts and more. All with full open and click rate statistics, double and even triple opt-in. Live statistics on bounces, opens, clicks and forwards. Pie charts and graphs updated in real time. There’s even more to see here!

Please be patient

This has turned out to be the biggest personal project I have undertaken and it wouldn’t have been possible without the huge assistance from Ron and Andrea (http://ronandandrea.com) who took care of making the WPMU site and new CommentLuv API to my sometimes semi-coherent specifications!
The finishing touches are being done now so I will need your patience as I fill the site with the content that’ll be needed for instructions, tutorials, videos, faqs, support tickets, forums and all the other things that are bound to turn up over the next 2 weeks.

Get to be the first!

You will find out when I’m ready to start issuing invites and preliminary accounts if you’re already a commentluv user. If you’re not, you can enter your details here and as soon as you confirm your subscription, you will receive an email when I open up the site for pre-launch beta users. There will also be news of how you can download the very latest version of the plugin before anyone else so you can be the first on the new list of active sites. Oh the joy!!

quick vidblog from the Fired Wok Chinese Takeaway.