FiddyP

Since CommentLuv got moved to the FiddyP server it has been performing quite well, I think Sharon had some trouble with the site loading slowly over the weekend and I think that’s probably to do with spam comments disprupting the script as there are times when the commentluv script that does the retrieving of the last post gets absolutely hammered.

50,000+ hits to the script each day is a fair amount, I think I need to update commentluv to ignore any comments made with a url that links direct to a file on a site rather than the root. That would probably catch a few of the spam comments from calling the remote script. I have updated the plugin recently to 1.93 but it seems as though the wordpress codex pages haven’t updated in a while. I’ll add some stuff and get it up to 1.94 and press for an update to the pages.

Here’s some hits!..

I am in the process of doing something with all the last blog posts found, right now the script just passes back the html to add to the comment being submitted but for the future I will put in some code that will store statistics in a database which will, eventually, lead to a widget for people to use to display something similar to blogrush but for their own commenters.

I might even get around to doing a back end registration site for it, it might be nice for people to be able to log into a commentluv settings page where they can choose a default feed url for their site which will be used whenever commentluv encounters their registered url.

People could promote a particular post on their page too, log in and set it to display a particular html link for any comment they make on a commentluv enabled blog.

ooh ooh, there could even be stats page to show how many sites display their last blog posts and and and…(anyone know a way to extend the hours in a day?) lol

hmm, what do you think? any ideas for back end features of a commentluv site?

My blog is 2 months old today and I woke up this morning to see a Google pagerank of 5 applying to this site!

This is the first site I have built that didn’t have the whole PR thing predominant in it’s construction, I just wanted to have some fun for a change and along with my wordpress plugins and prolific commenting, I get a PR of 5 and an Alexa rank up to 223,600.

In that time, my online counter says over 16000 unique visitors came here, my page hits on my other stats says an awful lot more but 16000 is a good enough number to say!

The busiest day always seems to be Tuesday and a peak of traffic comes in at around 4 o’clock in the afternoon (UK time), Stumbleupon has been the biggest traffic source with the weblog tools collection site and the official WordPress plugins page for CommentLuv coming in second and third.

Google itself has only accounted for about 1000 of the entire hits, it’ll be interesting to see if those go up now it’s a PR 5 here.

I haven’t even got any monetization going on here, apart from a small link in the sidebar to a pre-release affiliate program, I may go the monetization route later in the year. First, I want a professional redesign of this place. More 2.0 colour scheme and a rounded corner look and a little bit of tidying up on the sidebar and then I’ll start thinking about some flyby advertising to see if can get my PR down a little

Sooo, who’s up for a free paid review? lol

Here is a list of plugins that I have used on my old blog and couldn’t live without when I moved to FiddyP.

• SH-autolink
  An excellent plugin that can make keywords automatically link to whatever you want. Just install and avtivate. Go to Manage/Sh-autolink and you can add a word and it’s corresponding link, you can also choose to open link in the same window, new window, parent frame or top frame. I use it all the time for words like uvme or elottery or vwd.
  I like the fact that the html for the links isn’t saved with the post so if you want to change where a particular word links to, you can and anywhere that word is in your posts it will link to the new url
• Deans Permalinks Migration Plugin
  This saved my life, I had my permalinks set to the old ?cat= and I wanted to change them to a more search engine friendly version without ruining the old links and this did the job, it makes the old links report a 301 page moved and the search engines will index the new one and you don’t lose any page rank and all the old links still work.
• Feedburner Feedsmith
  Makes all your feeds point to your feedburner feed so you can track the amount of subscribers and also see what posts they clicked through to and more. It makes it much easier for surfers to subscribe by providing links to all the major feed subscription services like google reader and yahoo.
• Instant Upgrade
  I hated updating WordPress, there were too many chances of overwriting the wrong files. Fortunately, this plugin takes care of all that for you. It’s reported to work with the 2.3 upgrade too.
• Popularity Contest
  This assigns scores to your posts based on comments, pingbacks, permalink views and more. You can also display the top posts in your sidebar. Nice to have the most viewed posts up for display to new visitors.
• Related Posts
  I’ve found myself clicking on related post links when I have clicked through to a single post on someones blog so I installed the plugin here and the related posts links have been getting clicked, especially on a single post that’s getting a lot of hits from Stumbleupon. It may take a few posts before it starts getting better at relating the content but it works quite well.
• Samsarin PHP widget
  An easy peasy way to add php scripts to your widget enabled blog, just past your script in the widget options and drag it to the sidebar to have it execute along with the wordpress core php on the server side. Good if you use widgets on your sidebar and have a plugin that requires you to edit the sidebar template with the plugins procedure name.
• IG:Syntax Hiliter
  Probably the best plugin for showing source code on your blog, it can do html, php, javascript, perl and much more. Very easy to use, the way to add buttons to the post page isn’t really needed if you only show one type of language, just use the [] [/]tags with the language name to enclose the code.
• Live
  Adds a really nice AJAX real time stats page to your admin pages. Shows visits, referers and comment entry.
• Top Commentators
  Encourage people to make more than one visit and comment, reward them for joining the discussion with a list of top commentators on your sidebar.
• Subscribe to Comments
  An easy way to allow surfers to subscribe to the comments of the post that they comment on.
• WP-Online Counter
  Shows how many visitors on your site at one time and keeps a total of unique visitors over time.
• WP AJAX edit comments
  How many times have you made a comment on someones blog and noticed a typo after you submitted? lol, it happens to me all the time. This plugin allows your commenters a few minutes to edit their comment.
• DoFollow
  Allows the links to your commenters sites to be followed by search engines, another nice incentive for people to join in the discussion of your blog.
• SpamKarma 2
  A lot of people use Akismet to combat comment spam but I have found SK2 to be a much better and easier experience. I very rarely have to moderate a comment or flag one as spam and on my old PR5 blog, it caught dozens a day and had a fantastic success rate on authorizing legitimate comments through all the mess of viagras and elargment spam.
• CommentLuv
  A nice way to spread some lurv to the readers who comment by adding a titled link to their last blog post. Like BlogRush but for people who you know, why link to strangers blogs with a widget when you can reward your commenters and provide links to people that are in your community?
  I made this one! I’m not a pro PHP coder and this isn’t at a full 1.0 release but it seems to work nicely on the blogs that I’ve seen it on and I’m going to keep developing this as my blog progresses.

Phew! and that’s not all of them, just the ones that I have found to be useful and above all, easy to install and use. Props to all the coders who provide the plugins that WordPress is famous for.