FiddyP

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.

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!

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!!

After deciding to take the day off, I managed to play a Jedi mind trick on myself. With all the pressure off for creating, my juices started flowing!

I have now updated the CommentLuv WordPress plugin to work with WP2.7rc1

It was working before but not if you wanted to change the settings. I’ve fixed that now and added some extra checks to the javascript so it shouldn’t need any more editing of the settings other than to enter the commentluv member id number.

You can download the very latest version of CommentLuv 2.6 here

It’s a beta version so you only need to download this one if you have 2.7 WordPress and you need to change the settings. Otherwise, wait for the big update to 2.7 when it happens in the new year!

Back to my off time!

The web awards voting has started!

Please consider giving commentluv a vote for the blog plugins category

I like the feature of being able to automatically tweet about it with a link after you’re done.

The new version of CommentLuv has been going since September 1st and has been written about on:

1. My Forum
2. The plugin page on my blog
3. The CommentLuv site
4. The wordpress codex
5. The WordPress MU Site
6. Every registered member
7. Through visiting every site I get notified about in Google Alerts that is using the old version.
8. Running a massive contest encouraging people to upgrade to the latest version

The old version is responsible for about 50,000 unnecessary hits to my server every day from automated spam bots that post direct to the wordpress comment post file, sometimes the server would fold from a busy spam day (it once had 1 million spam hits in a few hours!) so I had to find another way to let the people know that their version needs updating (just in case they didn’t see any of the above places).

Not to mention all the people complaining that their latest post wasn’t shown on some blogs, this is down to Feedburner not passing back fresh feeds to scripts unless they have cache enabled. The new version does this but the old one doesn’t. (feedburners fault, not mine!)

So, I put in a small message to be sent back instead of the last blog post if it was requested in the first 10 minutes of each hour;

CommentLuv needs updating on this site. Please download the latest version and install it on your site. This message will apear during the first 10 minutes of each hour. This remote script will cease returning posts in 7 days.

Is that so bad?

The alternative is just delete the remote scripts and everyone using the old version will be left with nothing happening instead.

What do you think? should I keep with the message or just delete the remote scripts so nothing gets sent back to the people that don’t upgrade or view their plugins page?

I’ve only seen one site complain but it was an un-ranked, 0.4 average comments per post site written anonymously who posted to their site instead of contacting me direct via the squillion ways possible (my email, forum, site, phone, skype, yahoo, gmail……) but, ever the conscientious coder, I don’t want to offend anyone by daring to ask them to upgrade a plugin because their old one can affect the performance of my server and subsequently, the 100-200K last blog posts that get sent back to the users who DID upgrade. :-/

If you see the message above when someone comments, it means the blog being commented on needs to upgrade the plugin for the good of everyone who uses the proper version (in fact, for the good of the whole universe!) I have a support ticket function open at CommentLuv so if anyone needs help updating or even if you want to shout at me, you just need to click… (surely that is more efficient and quicker than writing a whole post about it?)

I have learned a gadoodle of information over the past 3 weeks of coding the update to CommentLuv and it would have gone a lot smoother had I known these 2 things.

Including jQuery with wp_enqueue_script

This seems to be simple at first but there is an important caveat to note.

You can include the jQuery library manually by echoing out a <script src=”… in your plugin code which works but could cause a problem if a user has changed their wp-content location or there are other plugins including jquery which would mean it gets loaded twice or more which isn’t ideal.

The solution is to use wp_enqueue_script but, it needs to be put in the right place!

If you use the wp_head action to call a function that has wp_enqueue_script in it then the library wont be included, using wp_head is too late in the render process for WP to put in the include.

Instead, I put wp_enqueue_script(‘jquery’); under the actions and hooks commands so it is run as early as possible in the execution of the plugin.

The plugins directory constant wp_plugin_dir

This has always tripped me up for some reason but it all became clear recently.

If you want to reference an image or js file in your plugins directory it is a lot better to use a constant than to put in an absolute url. I thought I had solved everything by using the constant WP_PLUGIN_DIR which works with WP2.6 and up but doesn’t work with WP2.5.1

What if you want to make it compatible with wp2.5? simple!, use this code in your plugin and you can use all the constants for WP2.6

if ( ! defined( 'WP_CONTENT_URL' ) )
define( 'WP_CONTENT_URL', get_option( 'siteurl' ) . '/wp-content' );
if ( ! defined( 'WP_CONTENT_DIR' ) )
define( 'WP_CONTENT_DIR', ABSPATH . 'wp-content' );
if ( ! defined( 'WP_PLUGIN_URL' ) )
define( 'WP_PLUGIN_URL', WP_CONTENT_URL. '/plugins' );
if ( ! defined( 'WP_PLUGIN_DIR' ) )
define( 'WP_PLUGIN_DIR', WP_CONTENT_DIR . '/plugins' );

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.

The CommentLuv WordPress plugin has been updated to version 2.7 and combined with a new WordPress network. Click below to get the latest copy of CommentLuv or visit the site to create your own WP2.92 blog with CommentLuv already installed.