FiddyP

Like running and other endurance activities, programming and website creation can cause you to come up against an invisible wall now and then. Especially if you consume 3 weeks of spare time with coding and creating and supporting and marketing.

I hit a wall just the other day, I’d been at the keyboard day and night and every single spare moment available coding the recode of the API and making the new theme do what I wanted (like work on the 3 big browsers).

When I wasn’t at the pc, I was thinking, sketching and pondering about what I was due to do the next time I got near a mouse. It was just about to calm down and I got called for a filmed interview about The ComLuv Network by UKFast (my awesome hosting company) which then meant I was bound to sit at the pc for many a long hour making sure the site looked sweet and tasty in time for any screenshots or flyins for the video.

I had just managed to get it done in time and, right after the interview (which went really well!) I jumped face first into the virtual coding wall, bazoompf!

I really wanted to get on and put the new support ticket system in and add a few widgets but the wall wouldn’t let me, no matter how hard I thought about it, I just couldn’t make myself sit down and get started.

stage left: misery and mental self flagellation enters

stage right: TV saunters in

That’s right, TV. I cured my wall-ness by watching some crap TV. That’s all it took. After not watching TV for 4 months, seeing just a few hours of it left me feeling like I was completely wasting valuable time with this utter drivel.

An early night and one of those weird promise yourself mantras that I sometimes do before bed and the very next morning I was refreshed and eager to code the code again.

Now I have replaced the not-so-great support system on ComLuv with a nice shiny new one that can build up a knowledge base from the tickets supported.

sorted.

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 made an announcement via CommentLuv.com to the ~1200 subscribers using email and I got a great response from quite a few people within minutes of sending it except, one person said they didn’t want to receive any communication at all from me.

Now, I’m not a spammer and I firmly believe in only letting people know about important news and changes no more than once a week so it’s a little disconcerting to receive a stfu email (even though it was from less than a tenth of 1% of those who received the same email)

I tried to be polite in my response and pointed the person to the checkboxes that could be unticked to stop receiving email but to be honest, those check boxes were right there to be seen when they registered and similar to many support requests, it was easier for the person to type up an email requesting the answer than it was to RTFM so I felt like saying something else entirely! politeness won through though (thanks mum)

Now, ever the conscientious coder I don’t want to cause a problem with even 1 commentluvver so I need to ask you something..

if you’re using some software for free and benefit from it and like to use it, expect updates to fix bugs , someone on the end of an email when something goes wrong or want a speedy response on the forum, is it too much to ask for me to be able to let you know by email when those bug fixes and updates happen?

Oh the fun of creating new things!!! I’ve had the time of my coding life over the past few weeks while I develop the 2.0 version of CommentLuv.

It’s took me to the sites for jQuery, Mysql, php, wordpress and others a million times and I’ve learned tons from my toe dipping into mysql and seeing just how many requests are sent to my server…

I can’t wait to show you what is happening to what started off as a simple WordPress only plugin!

Here’s the list of changes for the upcoming 2.0 loveliness .

The Plugin

• Runs with jQuery
  This will help an awful lot to combat the automated spam comment scripts. Because the plugin is activated and displayed using javascript, the remote script wont get called by people posting directly to the comments file or for Curl’ing scripts. I’m happy with that!
• Runs with AJAX
  This makes it much faster, it wont add any load on the hosting server because all the fetching is done client side and it’s all done while the visitor is typing their comment.
• Link Tracking
  Track which of your comments get the last blog post clicked, see what post titles work best for you

(continue reading…)

hurray! since getting my o2 broadband, my download speed has to be displayed as Mb/s instead of Kb/s.

I was getting 1.6Mb/s on a download the other day and everyone who I told about it, either didn’t care or didn’t know just how awesome being able to download at over a meg per second is.

the infidels!

It got me thinking about those other times where I was raving about something cool and the people I’m talking to get that glassed over look in their eyes that means they’re humouring me because I might be able to fix their computer later…:-)

I had 6 computers to fix yesterday, here are some of the things I heard..

1. “it wasn’t like that before”
   if you say so… (thinking…hah! don’t make me laugh, you don’t even know what it is like now, you probably don’t even know what it is in the first place)
2. “OMG it’s showing all my personal data”
   well, yes, you just signed in with a username and password. You’re probably registered on their site
3. “but I’ve got a virus scanner”
   a virus scanner wont protect you if you open that msn file send request from someone you don’t know
4. “it came free with my broadband”
   yes but you still need to scan regularly with up to date definitions
5. “up to date whatinifitions?”
   [sigh]
6. “that other computer has a virus scanner, can I just take it from there and put it on this one?”
   [loooong sigh]
7. “but it’s connected at 100Mb/s, how come it’s so slow?”
   that’s the speed of your network card connection, not your internet speed
8. “oh, but my internet speed is 8meg”
   It’s up to eight meg sure, you’ll probably get around 3/4 of a meg in actual download speed
9. “can I access this router from my home?”
   where do you live?
   “it’s just down the road…”
   [@!??]

sometimes I feel like the man with one eye in the kingdom of the blind