This weeks round of CommentLuvvers….

http://slyvisions.com/ is a nice looking blog with some interesting unique articles on how to make a bit of money with your blog and the interwebs. I love his slyguy simpson like motif, check it out!

http://www.caroline-middlebrook.com/blog/ is one of those blogs that makes me feel slightly inadequate due to the fact that Caroline has an absolute tonne of quality content on her site and is an experienced, talented and prolific writer. Just a few minutes browsing her site will increase your bIQ (blog intelligence quotient) and after you get over the feeling of “how could I possibly get to this level”, you’ll go deeper and deeper into her articles and come out feeling inspired to put just a little bit more effort into your writing. Check out one of her most popular posts about using CSS galleries for backlinks and trackbacks

http://bloggrrl.com/This is a site I have browsed by quite a few times and I’m really pleased to see it is now using CommentLuv to great effect. You can read some great stumbleworthy posts such as 8 Signs that you masturbate too much and 8 ways you can spot a real jerk which is a follow up to 8 ways to spot a psycho woman. Check her out!

http://hotfessional.com/ Is a great no-holds-barred, and funny-as-fok site from a “female executive in a mans world”. You can read real laugh out loud posts such as working from home day 1 – “Spending 2 hours trying to hook up a printer to your laptop that has no ink in it sucks. donkey. balls.”. There’s even poetry and a good haiku here and there. A blog that has been bookmarked on my work computer for brightening up the otherwise cloudy days.. definitely my current favourite blog. I must have spent hours on there today, one of the very very few blogs that I have clicked through to the next page after reading the whole first page.

It seems CommentLuv is enjoying an upsurge of installs again, this usually happens when a big blogger like The Brown Baron, Revellian, Howtospoter or John Cow installs it and gives it a mention so I thought I had better address some (small) issues with it and give it a rewrite.

I’ve sketched out the first draft of the flow chart which is a good reminder in my own mind of how things link together. It’s a chart that will expand further and take up more and more space, from experience I think it will take another 4 or 5 sketches to get the full flow down on paper and then I can take that and refine and expand it to take into account the individual functions and then I can start on the coding proper!

Some things I am going to put in this new version…

• Options Page
  • Change displayed text under comment area
  • Change styling options for last blog post display
  • Change message for last blog post display
  • Option to use external script for blogs with no curl support
  • Setting for how hard the plugin should look for the feed
  • Setting for enable CommentLuv by default
  • Timeout setting for MAGPIE
• AJAX support for background fetching during comment entry*
• Include MAGPIE library in plugin directory**
• Tidy up WP_OPTIONS function for older versions of CommentLuv

* Use jquery to call the function after the comment author URL field loses focus, this will store the authors feed in the cache so when the user submits the comment, the feed in the cache will be used. This will prevent any hanging around after the comment has been submitted while the plugin searches for the feed location.

** Currently, there are some cases of the default include of MAGPIE saving each and every feed cache to the WP database in WP_OPTIONS/OPTION_NAME which tends to make it grow quite large, also some users have reported it being set to “autoload on” which can have an effect on load times. This wont happen if I use a separate MAGPIE include.

So, that’s it, those are my ideas for the new version of CommentLuv. Do you have any suggestions for things you’d like to see?

I keep a track of who installs commentluv by monitoring pings that come in to the plugin page when a new blog activates CommentLuv. I do try and make a comment on each one but some slip through the net due to immense workloads that take priority.
I am taking a bit of advice from Revellian about blogging karma and having a regular spot for linking out to blogs I have seen. What better way to promote CommentLuv and reward those that use it?

The first blog on this list will be Kens Trees, he has a photo blog about his effort to grow bonsai trees from seed. This looks like a blog that has some longevity, it takes bloody ages for a tree to grow so I hope that Ken will keep his blog going for some time while he documents how Willard the Dawn Redwood grows.

Another blog I know you will enjoy is Stephen Hopsons blog, he’s a qualified deaf pilot! Among his posts are some real thought provokers like this one about not giving when you know you should

A great Philippino blog to check out is BendzG, a blog for juicy oriental gossip and much more besides! It’s great to see CommentLuv being used on so many international blogs!

If you have a blog that uses CommentLuv and want a mention, leave me a comment somewhere on any of my posts and I’ll give you a mention in the next CommentLuvvers post. If you want to see more blogs that use CommentLuv, be sure to check the sidebar for the latest people to activate the plugin.

I am really pleased that a few people have started using the CommentLuv plugin, I was over at Chessnoids place and saw that one of his commenters had a post called “7 reasons why I hate stumbleupon” under his comment and I had to click it!

I ended up visiting a site I had seen before on stumbleupon and the post is quite funny, as one of the other commenters said “Haha spoken like a true SU junkie. I feel your pain buddy ”

I saw that Chessnoid had been there in the comments too, and it confirms what I had originally thought, the people that comment on your own blog must have similar views or interests to you because otherwise, they wouldn’t be commenting on your posts and the people that comment on their blogs must also be similar to you and so on and so on. What a great way to find new blogs and meet ‘proper’ people.

I hope some more people get to use this plugin, I’m sure it can add to a community spirit amongst bloggers that use it, spread the lurv

I’ve seen a “You Comment, I follow” badge on quite a few blogs now and every single one that I’ve commented on has had them come here and make a comment about one of my posts, thanks everyone that has so far!

Randa Clay has a post about The I Follow Movement on her blog.

I like the css way of doing it, the one above was made with this code

<div style="width: 123px;height: 52px">
  <div style="float: right;width: 118px;height: 20px;color: #000000;font: bold 15px arial;padding-top: 3px;margin: 2px 2px 0px 2px;text-align: center">
U COMMENT
  </div>
  <div style="float: right;width: 118px;height: 20px;color: #FFFFFF;font: bold 15px arial;padding-top: 3px;margin: 2px;text-align: center">
I FOLLOW
  </div>
</div>

It’s a powerful thing, I’ve just installed the DoFollow Plugin and I’ll be placing a button on the sidebar too. Follow the movement!