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!

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
• Works with registered users and on WordPress MU
  Now blogs with ‘register to comment’ restrictions can use the plugin. It’s also compatible with WordPress MU which opens up a whole new section of bloggers.
• Theoretically compatible with more than just blogs or wordpress
  Because it uses javascript only, it opens the plugin up to any blog that allows the user to add code to the head of their template. This even opens it up to places like forums and simple guest books. Work will start on other platforms as soon as the 2.0 final is out
• Free Support Site
  CommentLuv.com is a support site where I can provide lots of cool extras that you just can’t get with the current commentluv plugin. It only takes a moment to register a site and afterwards you get a whole heap of cool things (see The Site below)
• It looks pretty!
• Language support
  I’ve added the code for language support, there is a German language file coming soon as well as Hebrew and Chinese
• It’s FREE
  I’m not a big corporation, I’m just one guy with too much pc time on his hands. If the site gets a lot of traffic, I might make some money on adspace or I might not. It doesn’t matter, I have felt a great sense of fun and satisfaction from creating this plugin and site and find it really helps me to learn new programming languages and methods to have a project that continues to challenge me it’s also nice when people say how cool I am for creating a plugin

Advantages of registering your site for free at the CommentLuv.com site

• Choose from your last 10 posts instead of just the one when you comment on CL blogs
• Faster retrieval of your posts for your registered URL
• Choose your cache time for even speedier return of links
• Change your feed address
  Useful if you want to register a domain that has no feed of it’s own so you can use blogs with KeywordLuv to point to your business domain with keywords and also have a titled link to it’s/your associated blog.
• Default link and anchor text
  Set it so the plugin returns a link to a particular page on any site when you comment on CL blogs using your normal domain name as URL. This is particularly useful if you want to promote a post that isn’t on your last 10 posts or promote a splash page or if your blog is offline.
• Statistics
  By being registered, you get your sites comments that get a commentluv link and all the comments you make on other CL blogs stored which will enable the site to show you where you’ve commented and if they’ve commented on you.

  Other great stats will be things like, your most advertised blog post, your most frequented blog, your most commented post, the top commentluv receiving commentator and so on. I am working on some pretty hardcore things that will create a ‘map’ type network for you to look at that shows how your own personal ‘comment web’ grows.

• A place to report spam
  If you find a particular url is spamming yours and/or your friends site then this can be dealt with at source, enough reports of a spammer will see them removed from CommentLuv and no blog using it will display their last post so it benefits everyone, when a spammer knows that no CommentLuv enabled blog will show their last post, they’ll stop using those sites to spam their crap.
• Featured sites
  Every week will be a new CommentLuv enabled site featured bringing fame and fortune to the blog owner. It will be on the first page and (if all goes well with traffic) should get a fair amount of click-thrus
• CommentLuv directory
  Add keywords and a description to your site and users will be able to browse through different categories to find what they’re after. This could increase your traffic and commentators (and spammers I suppose but see above about reporting spam) immensely
• Support
  One stop shop for questions and feature requests
• Exclusivity
  Enable CommentLuv only for registered users. Could be useful if you’re finnicky with giving out links
• Contests!!
  I’ve been wanting to do this for a long time but I didn’t have the resources in place. I’d love to have random ‘spot’ prize winners, all someone (registered user) has to do is comment on a registered CommentLuv enabled blog and they could win a cool gadget or Amazon voucher or paypal payment.

  The great thing is, the blog owner wins too! This could really encourage comments for blog owners and they also get to win something too. Rules will be simple, a winner will know they’ve won because instead of their last blog post coming back, a winners message will be there. They’ll have to claim the prize on the blog that they won it on so the blog owner gets return visitors who participate in the discussion.

Summary

So, that’s it (for now). Some of these changes are already live and others will be phased in as and when I am happy that each new addition is working well. I should have the stable beta release of the new plugin by the end of the weekend. Once that’s out and doing well, all the rest of the stuff can be worked on with the site without having to change the plugin. I might even get it done in time for entry into the WordPress MU plugin contest.

Once the stable version goes to a full 2.0 final, I will slowly phase out the remote scripts for the existing commentluv. In the past 8 days, the remote script has been hit over half a million times! lots of those are unnecessary spam hits but it still handles tens and tens of thousands of last blog posts every single day so I will have to handle the handover gently!

It amazes me how long someone will wait to upgrade a plugin or wordpress because they feel FTP is too intimidating to try and do it themselves. It’s a normal thing though I suppose, wordpress is so easy to use that just about anyone can get a blog up and running with very little knowledge. I hope WP2.7 comes with a browsable plugin directory from the dashboard with automatic plugin upgrades and installation to make things easier.

You can register your site already at the CommentLuv.com site and be one of the first to be able to choose from your last 10 posts on the sites that install the new version. It’s already live here and at commentluv.com and a few beta testers sites (see previous post). It’s free to register and easy to verify your site with the automated process on the settings page once you’re logged on.

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