“Awesome Features”

CommentLuv Premium allows you to unlock advanced backlink features on 10′s of thousands of blogs. It has been shown to increase comments and traffic to blogs that install it and helps to make your posts go viral by integrating with twitter, facebook and google plus.

It combines 8 plugins in to 1 which all work in harmony to reduce spam, provide stats of where your links are being clicked, deny trackbacks from spammers, allow users to use keywords in their name, leave their twitter name in the comments, showcase your top commenters and more.

The plugin has many new features :

• Integrated anti spam measures that prevent almost 100% of botspam
• Dofollow readers links with advanced rules so you look after your most loyal readers
• Unique social enticements which helps your posts to go viral on Twitter, facebook and Google+
• Integrated twitterlink functions to allow readers to leave their twitter names on comments
• Improved version of Keywordluv with much tighter control over who gets to use keywords
• Integrates trackback validation with improved heuristics
• Exclusive top commentators widget with advanced display control
• Dashboard and advanced stats that show you where your links are getting clicked
• Free updates for life using the easy one click automatic update system
• more being added all the time!

You can find out more about CommentLuv Premium at CommentLuv.com

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 decided on a course of action for having my own products.. Rather than write an ebook which I wouldn’t do anyway because I just despise writing copy! and rather than try and convert my CommentLuv plugin to become a fully fledged big budget premium plugin (which I will do eventually), I am going to try my hand at releasing some smaller plugins for a very reasonable price.

People want updates and support

From my own experience of my free plugins, one thing that I know people want when installing plugins to their site is somewhere to go for help when things go wrong or when other plugins don’t play nice.

Another thing they want is regular updates or at least the knowledge that their site isn’t going to break because they update their WordPress code and the plugin doesn’t play nice with the new functions.

If it is too big it’s too bad!

The biggest road block to me releasing the super duper update to CommentLuv that would take it into the realms of ‘premium plugin’ is the fact that it’s already grown to such a long list of source code and it’s functionality is already a headache when I start thinking what I’ll have to do it add this or that feature.

I’ve seen it with other premium plugin coders that are trying to survive on their own. Releasing something so big and so super duper that you can charge between 50 and 100 dollars for it means you have to really make it super duper and chock full of features. Then you’ll have to create a support site and probably forums where you’ll spend 50% of your time, the other 50% will be either coding the updates or marketing. Good luck if you want to release more than 1, you’ll need a team of coders, supporters and designers and marketers.

For he guys at premium.wpmudev.org it’s not a big deal but for little ol’ me? well, I’m going to try something different. Something that is maintainable and wont require a visit to Dragons Den or seek angle investors. Something that I can actually release more than one of.

Bring on low cost, great value blog bling!

My plan is to release a set of great value blog bling plugins at a price where people wont have to break the bank or hesitate for too long before buying. I’m going to integrate it with the existing comluv credits system which allows existing comluv affiliates to advertise them and earn a percentage from any credits purchases that result and I’m going to provide top level support that is exclusive to people who purchase the plugins.

They are going to be useful little buggers, these plugins -o -mine! And because they are going to be managable in size and updates, I’ll be able to release more than one. Here’s three very reasonably priced plugins that I have written and found to be really useful for my own sites.

Dashboard Tweeter

Price: – $20
A nice dashboard widget that greets you with your latest @replies from twitter and allows you to respond without ever leaving the dashboard area. The advantage is that you can set up your own twitter application so when your replies go out there, there’ll be a handy link directly back to your blog for people to click.

It also has Direct messages and your twitter stream to browse too. All links and hashtags are automatically converted to open in a new window links and all replies/DM’s will use the proper format so that they are fully compatible with the twitter api.

You can see what it looks like in action here – Dashboard Tweeter

Installation video, lifetime updates and support forum

future: this could be expanded to allow your recent posts to be tweeted from the widget and even notify users who have supplied their twitter username when their comment has received a reply.

Guest Blogger Notify

Price – $15
If you’ve ever had a guest blogger come to visit and write on your site then you’ll like this one. It will allow you to choose which meta boxes you want shown on an add new post page in your dashboard when it’s a contributor.

It’ll also add a user configurable message box to the write post page that you can use to let contributors know what your posting guidelines are direct on the page they’re writing on.

What sets it apart will be that it automatically emails the contributor when their post is published using the message you set.

No more support tickets or emails from contributors asking if their post is published yet!

Instructional video and premium priority exclusive support.

Future : this could be expanded to have a feature where guest posts will show an author box with the users bio description and links to their site.

Choose Full Feed Post

Price: -$15
This will be useful if you use subscribe to feed by email services by Feedburner or Feedblitz.

It will allow you, on a post by post basis, to choose which posts will show the full text and which posts will show just the summary in the RSS feed of your site.

Now you no longer need to choose one or the other, you can have both! If you have set your feed to excerpts only but you have a newsletter type post or something you would rather the reader sees fully in their feed read then you can. Similarly, if you have full feed posts set then a particularly long post can be set as excerpt only which keeps the size of the emails that are sent out down to manageable levels.

Same full exclusive support and instructional videos.

future: This can be expanded to have a feed only shortcode function so you can show text , images and links only in the feed. A great way to encourage people to subscribe.

Life time updates!

One of the advantages to me and to the purchasing user would be to have lifetime updates and priority support.

If I am getting paid for it then answering your support questions is a no brainer! I would be happy to exchange my time for your money

Updates to wordpress break the plugin? no problem! if you’ve paid for a plugin then it seems fair that I would make sure that it would be compatible with future versions of WordPress. Once you have paid, you will be guaranteed lifetime updates.

All of this for just a few dollars.

Would you pay ?

If you knew you were going to receive 1st rate support and guaranteed updates, would you consider paying between 5 and 20 dollars for a plugin?

your comments are welcome!

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?)