I finally got a good nights sleep!!

Nope, they’re not replacement day-glow nipples! they’re a set of comfortable silicone ear plugs that fit nice and deep in your ear to drown out external noise. I finally had a proper sleep without being woken up by the over sensitive car alarm or the too-fast drivers who scrape their under carriage when they speed over the speed bumps outside my window.

Cheap as chips (and better for your ears)

I got 10 pairs for less than a fiver and because they’re reusable, I think they’ll last a long time! (a lot longer than sticking chips in your ears anyway)

They have a small plastic rod inside which help to insert them in your ear, which you have to do with two hands.. one hand that reaches around the back of your head to pull your lobe and the other inserts the plug. You can remove the rod if you want, I just pulled it out a bit and left it in while I slept.

It’s like being dead

Seriously, I thought I was dead it was so quiet! My missus has to stay up later than me some nights and normally ends up going into another room that’s cold just so she can do some accounts but no more! Once I have these little blighters in my ears, she can watch TV, count coins or talk on the phone and I’m fast asleep just a metre or so away.

I’m so much happier in the morning if I’ve had a good sleep.

Win your own plugin!

I’ve had some phenomenal traffic and trackbacks to the CommentLuv plugin page since I made it and with all that action it has upped the plugin page to a PR of 6.

Now, I know PR isn’t so widely worshipped as much as it used to be but, PR is like money… it’s not until you have it that you realize that it’s not that important. Unless, you don’t have it and then it seems like everything will get better if only you did have it!

So here’s an idea that could get someone the fame and fortune that comes with writing a new plugin, I’ve written a few custom plugins for this site and I thought it might be nice to run a contest for the chance for someone to be the offical site for the plugin. (beware, I have had literally thousands of comments on the commentluv page! so be prepared to get a ton of your own comments if you win)

The link for the plugin page on the plugins’ dashboard page would point to the winners site.

The winners site will be the ‘official’ place for the plugin so it will be shown in the readme, on the wordpress codex download page and anywhere else someone writes a review of the plugin. If I update the plugin then I notify you and you can update the plugin release page.

The choice of plugins:

• Contest Notify
  This plugin checks a category and if there’s a post in it, it slides a div down containing the excerpt of the post and a link to the page. It also looks for a custom field called “prizepic” and retrieves the url of the image to be used.

  It’s pretty basic at the moment because I just use it myself but I see some areas of improvement such as putting all the settings in it’s own dashboard page so a user can change the title and style of the box so it can be used for all sorts of featured posts instead of just contests…

• Close comments per post
  This is a simple plugin that looks for a custom field called “closecontest” in a post and checks the date given and if the post is after that date and time, it closes the comment form. It’s really useful for time specific posts like contests or when you ask for opinions on plans you have that are about to start.
• LivingPostImage(requires Curl and Flickr API)
  This is a fairly adaptable plugin for putting an image into a post. yey! well, there’s a little more to it than that. It does require the user to apply for a Flickr API but that’s quite a simple process and free.

  I call it Living because it always gets the latest public picture for the search terms given so the picture changes over time which helps to keep the posts looking like new. It can search for terms you give it or use the title of the post or the first 3 tags of the post. It outputs the html to display the picture directly or can pass back an array of url, page url and title.

• Custom Scripts Per Post
  Simple plugin that allows you to include javascript in the head of the page for a particular post only. It’s pretty useful if you write tutorials or you want a particularly snazzy bit of script included for just one post. Just give the path to the script in a custom field called “myscripts” and it’ll be included for that post.

So, what do you think? any suggestions or ideas? I think it could turn out to be a pretty good traffic generator for someone….

I checked my stats just now and my jaw dropped, after just over 1 year of blogging, I have finally gone past the million hits a month mark!

I’ve also noticed my Alexa rank go to lower and lower numbers over the past few weeks too. As I write this it is at 61,627 which puts me in the top 7000 websites in the UK. rule brittania!!

It looks as though not much has changed in the way of which posts are most popular, just how much more traffic they get.

I think it’s time I released a new plugin. It’ll be the contest notify one that you might see drop down on this post. It frees a spot for a featured post and allows you to continue writing posts without worrying about dropping the contest post too far down the screen so it doesn’t get enough attention.

Hopefully that can take me up a few more hits or so!

Take a look at the screenshot of my current stats page below..

that’s 1 million 8 hundred and 19 thousand 502 hits so far this month

by golly!

I started this blog with the tagline “get hits or die tryin” as a bit of a joke but I never imagined this site could get so busy. I attribute most of it to being an internet god my CommentLuv plugin and remote script that does the fetching of the last blog post.

A few people have asked why the script that does the fetching is held remotely on my server and it’s because of my new plans that are starting to come together (mwuhahaha!). The AJAX platform independent version of CommentLuv and associated member site will be soon, the AJAX version is the reason behind the remote script. This way I’ll be able to code a CommentLuv plugin that only requires the user to be able to add a javascript reference to the head of their template, no WordPress core code needed at all. Things will start to rok soon enough!

Thanks to everyone for continuing to visit FiddyP, I do it all for your (comment)luv

Looks like Google did some PR’ing recently because I’ve just been surprised by the amount of PR increase I have received on quite a few pages and sites, the main page here has gone back up to 5 and the commentluv page has gone up to 6!

The site I set up for free goes on the lottery has gone up to 5 for my id and 4 for everyone elses.

Even my crap napkin cartoon post has got itself a 5.

And my shop page category has gone up to 5 with only 1 product on it but at least they continue to trickle out. I really must get some more products on there and take advantage of the increased rank…

omg I am knackered, this post probably makes no sense but a whole week without a post or chance to visit my blogroll is hard to take so tired or not… I’m just gonna type

While I was at the Alexa page today, I noticed that John Cow has done something very clever, he made a picture parody of a Facebook page called “pensionbook” and it has received a massive amount of traffic over the past month. Check out his stats for the site that hosts the image (johncow.us)

Because of this traffic, his site got listed on the “movers and shakers” part of Alexa. Moving from a rank of 511,000 to 20,000 since the beginning of December. The root of Johncow.us has an image showing a template for sale image. Click through and you get the option of buying a basic version with links to johncow intact or pay a premium to have it without the links.

A pretty awesome pre-planned traffic attack! This is a really good example of monetizing a social bait page, he must have sold quite a few templates!

Unfortunately there are already people who are offering to provide the template for free (but not for long!)

My own Alexa rank has dropped below the 100K barrier now, sweet! For the UK it is below 8000, haha! and with over 50,000 unique visitors in through the doors before Christmas, all my traffic targets have been achieved. By March next year, I’d like to have over 100,000 more visitors and have my Alexa rank down to less than 50k.

I have a pretty good idea how I’m going to proceed, I have some wicked plans for CommentLuv, contests, tutorials and ebooks that will be fun to try. Roll on 2008!

I hope to see all my good blogging buddies rocking on through the new year, see you then!

I’ve seen quite a few blogs using CommentLuv now which is fantastic and I see a lot of comments about blog authors finding more great blogs by following the links to the last blog post but, I see some places not picking up everyones last post because their hosting does not allow Curl commands which is what I use for parsing the comment authors page, they can still use the fetch_rss() function so I have created some external hosting for a script that takes a URL, parses that page and outputs a feed with the location of the feed.

I’ve added a bit to the plugin that calls that external file if the hosting it is installed on doesn’t allow Curl commands, it can read the result because it doesn’t need to open it as a file using file and fopen commands.

I have found it is quicker to parse the users page first rather than try all the combinations of the default locations because each try can take up to 5 seconds (or whatever you put as the MAGPIE_TIMEOUT) which isn’t ideal. Now with the option of every blog being able to parse the users page first it shouldn’t take too long and because the rss functions of wordpress uses a cache when it reads a feed, when someone comes back and writes another comment on your blog, the plugin will use the location it found last time because it will be stored as a feed in the cache. yey!

I’ve also added a check box to allow the user to not add their last blog post, this is if you want to leave a comment asking a splog that is using commentluv to stop scraping your content (you wouldn’t want to leave a link to your blog on a splog) or if you are commenting on your own blog from elsewhere without being logged on and don’t want your last post shown.

I’ve made it easier to change the message that is displayed below the comment form too. Just edit the bit in the quotes in the source code below the changelog.

The Future
I am in the middle of learning event listeners so I can really cut the time down for parsing the page by doing it AJAX style after the user has entered their blog url and clicks to the comment area to make their entry. This should make CommentLuv almost completely transparent and prevent any longer than necessary waits after submitting the comment.

I imagine that will be after Christmas as well as adding language support and it’s own options page. I have purposely kept away from using extra tables in the WP database because, A) I don’t want to mess up an existing database, B) I haven’t used MySQL before, and C) I don’t know how! (yet)

Much later than that, I want to create a widget style box for displaying links to your commenters posts (Cliq style). I am sure I can add Gravatars to it too but that will require storing the last blog posts in the database in their own table.

You can download version 0.997 of CommentLuv here (one-click installer plugin users can use this link http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/commentluv.zip)

AJAX tutorials

Tutorial 4 is ready and will be published tomorrow. I have seen quite a few hits coming in for them so I have spent a bit more time trying to add some graphical explanations for each process in the script to make it a little easier to follow. I have part 5 all planned out so that part 6 can see you creating your own AJAX scripts. Maybe some homework assignments to send out?

Alexa Ranking

I am pleased to see my traffic going up a bit each week. The largest referrer is Stumbleupon with a steady stream of hits coming in as well as a few sharks fin spikes in my stats. I think that has helped with me getting close to the sub 100,000 mark for my alexa rank which, today is at 106,955. For just the sites visited by UK users, I am very close to being in the top 10,000 visited sites. (I can see it now, “FiddyP makes it to the top 10⁴ UK sites”)

Happy Hanuka/Christmas/Holidays/Eed Al-Adha (delete as appropriate)!

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

I started this blog 6 weeks ago even though I had a different blog for over 3 years before that and a few others that were tiny adsense nets, I never read so many other blogs until now, it feels like new blogs that are coming up or are just a few months old are different to the ones that were around last year and the year before.

The people writing them and the reason they’re writing them seem different, a little more real life perhaps. A bit more orientated towards nice people in a nice community willing to help others, welcoming strangers to their tight knit virtual space. A virtual space that could span thousands of miles across the globe in milliseconds, the buzz of a lively conversation spread over different servers just a ‘submit’ button away.

I feel lucky that I have wandered into this community where it’s a lot less “listen to what I have to say, click my adsense but don’t steal my PR!” and a lot more “tell me what you think about this and oh, go visit these nice people”

Take for instance, Sharon of The Diva Network who was one of the first regular visitors here when I started, she followed the MyBlogLogDogg back from her site to here and comes back a few times a week to catch up, she even helps out by answering peoples questions in the comments. I see her regularly on lots of blogs, always taking the time to help or give an insight to someones post. She was one of the first to help me test CommentLuv along with Miss Mira from lalla-mira.com who seems to be able to blog in 3 different languages!. Then SmocknMamma who likes to bake and make quilts helped out with a suggestion.

There’s Chessnoid and his TotalNoid blog, his informative site can have anything on there, the stock market, UFC, MMA, Movie reviews, SEO, Technorati and more. He seems to be part of the same community too, his readers and commenters have popped up here, I’ve seen them on other blogs that had the same ‘feel’ to them and I’ve seen others too…

I’ve seen Pelf and her visitors to her blog about breast cancer awareness and environmentalism among other things, her vistors led me to other blogs where there was another crossover with a like minded bunch of people, links in comments led me to people like Dana Wallert who wants to be a twenty something Stumbleupon queen, she regularly writes informative posts on sites like Stumbleupon and Sphinn. Amongst her commenters are people like Andy Beard who writes a niche marketing and affiliate tips blog (see his post about getting penalized by google), some of her top commentators are again, the same type of people. Chessnoid is there, as well as YC who appears all over the place! he writes about internet marketing and isn’t afraid of the big bad google!.

Brown Baron is a name I keep seeing mentioned here too, he writes about blog networking and social networking, Vegan Momma who makes natural beauty products who made a very nice write up of the CommentLuv plugin.

Bobby Revellian and his lively network of commenters on his blog about ethical commenting and great tips for other bloggers, again, many of his commenters appear on the other blogs above and more! each successive comment click takes me to another part of this ever expanding web of commentluv’ers, link luv’ers, anchorluv givers and such.

And AntiBarbie who has some great short story posts, see how many people comment there! some of those led me to The Passionate Ailurophile who’s rants made me smile at how she writes just like she speaks (I imagine) . hehe, stuph! – love that word now.

you know.. I could go on all day listing names of people and blogs that have made me think that blogging has a different feel to it now.

I don’t know about you but I want to meet the person that changed blogging and shake their hand. Before, in the old days of my elottery orientated blog I would sometimes feel like writing a new post was akin to a doing a chore (albeit a pleasant one like sweeping a big floorspace).

Because of the travel I have to do for work and the (more than) occasional 60 hour week I don’t get much ‘free’ time and used to resent giving some of it up to write another lottery related post on my old blog even though it got up to PR5 and was well known among other elottery people but now it’s much more different! I can find time between projects or slip in a session on google reader at work and wherever I am in the world, whatever I am doing, there is always that same community feeling when I go-a-browsing and comment clicking between these peoples blogs. Writing a new post and responding to someone else’s post have the same feeling for me now, a similar feeling to belonging to something bigger than me.

It makes me feel good, it makes me want to create.

I had my first SURGE of stumbleupon traffic and managed to capture the event on Camtasia!

I think I only got the tail end of it but it lasted for a nice while, it even came back the next day although at a reduced rate, stats and geekery below the video.

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I’m guilty of giving some of my own posts a thumbs up now and then to start a trickle of Stumbleupon traffic to an article I have written or seen elsewhere such as the Hide a rar file in a jpeg. I saw it on a blog completely obliterated with adsense blocks so I decided to reprint it here in a cleaner-easier-to-read way. It got some traffic and upped my feed subscriber count but, the traffic wasn’t huge, just a few hits each hour, but still nice to have some new readers to my new blog

Then, I saw a small side article in a daily newspaper (yes, there is news available outside the internet!) about how Tussauds in London was due to show it’s first ever computer game character, it looked like a great story and I did a bit of research on Google for “Tussauds” ,”London” and “master chief”.

There were plenty of articles but none that mentioned London. Great!, there was one page that I found about Master Chief being in the Las Vegas version of Tussauds, it had some good information and some really great pics so I thought I would snag the pics, do some Photoshopping on it to give them a London edge and “make me an article” for here.

I was quite pleased with the Master chief is coming to London and gave it a thumbs up on my work browser and finished off for the day and went home content with writing a new article that didn’t suck and wasn’t a copy and paste of some content found elsewhere.

When I got back home, I went to my Live page (a plugin [link] that displays hits to your site in realtime) in my WordPress dashboard to see what was going on at FiddyP and I was amazed!, the video above is the tail end of what I saw.

These are the load times in the middle of the spike..

So, even with 141 at a time coming in, the server was still able to send the page in less than 5 seconds to most of the world.

I think the difference with this self stumble was that it was for a unique article and a few people gave it a thumbs up one after the other, I think that if you can get a few thumbs up as soon as the submitted page goes into circulation then you get a sort of exponential increase which could lead to another one and so on. As long as you keep getting thumbs up, the traffic will keep coming.

The hits started again the next day..

Some google stats..
One of the (many) good things about Google analytics is the way you can refine the stats so you can see all the individual stats for a particular referrer or page, here’s what was found just for the stumbleupon visitors

Not bad, average of 2 pages per visit means a lot of them took the time to see what else was on the site. 33% is a pretty good bounce rate for a social networking happening.

Encouragingly, nearly 90% of the people coming in were using Firefox. Sensible people use Stumbleupon

The vast majority of visitors had bigger than a 1024×768 screen, most had widescreens which surprised me, there must be a lot more widescreens out there than I thought.

I’ve seen a lot of advice about being a top Stumbler or increasing your ‘juice’ at places like StumbleGods that say you should add as many friends as you like and be a social junkie with comments and reviews of peoples profile pages. I think they’re right but for someone as busy as me, it’s hard to dedicate time to spend all my day trying to make contacts, the upside is, the contacts I do make are because they have recommended particularly good pages or I’ve ‘met’ them through this blog.

I was trying to think how I could repeat the event with a new post and spent a little while thinking what “they” want but, I don’t want to try and predict what people that come here will like, that’s not why I started this blog.

The best thing that I can do is, not worry about what Stumblers want and carry on making my blog for me for fun and writing about things that I find interesting without re-hashing stuff that’s already been done, if people like a post they will stumble it and if it’s good enough then sure as eggs is eggs, other people will and so on.

Overall, it was a good experience being bathed in hits for a short while. At least my server didn’t crash and it has given me some encouragement to carry on doing the things I like to do anyway and that’s plenty of geekery with a sprinkle of humour and a drop or two of nice pictures.

Thanks Stumbleupon! (and users) it was fun while it lasted!

There’s a few bloggers commenting on a new widget called Blogrush, it’s a service that is supposed to increase your traffic by sharing links to relevant stories on other Blogrush users blogs and your posts being displayed on theirs and so on.

It’s a great idea and I expect it will work for a while with all the buzz happening but, here are 7 reasons why I wont be using it…

1. The rich get richer…

The person with the most traffic and established blog will benefit most, sure if you refer them and they get the 10,000 views a day on their pages to give you your credits and all the other people referred by you and them get you credits (10 levels they say) then surely there’s going to be the situation where there’s more credits than available blogs? I thought about this and it seems they can just rotate the links to be shown enough times on high traffic blogs so it uses the credits up.

If you have 1000 credits and your link is on five or six high traffic sites, it will only be seen for a very short time before it gets pushed out by another site. 5 blogs getting 200-300 hits a day means your link will only be shown for part of a day.
If you already have lots of traffic, you will get even more! but, if you only have a few hits (credits earned) a day then your links will be gone in no time at all.

2. You lose credibility

What I don’t like the most’est is the referral nature of it, people will be referring others, not because it’s a great site or service but only for the traffic they can harvest from it. They wont care if your blog is good or not, they just want the credits! Not to mention the inevitable, someone creating an extremely high traffic spammed page with a widget it on it so they can rack up credits by displaying links to yours and other peoples sites, showing your blog link on a spam site is bound to affect your credibility with the search engines. Showing a link to your blog on a spam site will lower your value to surfers

3. You’re working for someone else

It’s MLM for nothing, now MLM and word of mouth are great tools for promotion but only if you get something valuable enough for it, like money! (I worked very hard with elottery and make a bundle from it, I plan on doing the same with uVme). If you’re going to promote someone else’s product then you should get paid for it with money, not promises of ‘exponential’ traffic. I feel that Blogrush is benefiting only Blogrush, they are getting everyone else to build their list for them, they’ll have thousands if not tens of thousands of peoples email address and topics of interest, powerful stuff when you want to market to targeted people!.

4. You will be sold stuff by email

I would expect to receive marketing emails from Blogrush after registering with them, maybe not straight away but definitely in the future. Their privacy policy states

If you are a registered user of an Income.com website and have supplied your email address, Income.com may occasionally send you an email to tell you about new features, solicit your feedback, or just keep you up to date with what’s going on with Income.com and our products.

Their main site is due to launch soon and it’s targeted at entrepreneurs, so you can be certain they’ll be hocking a “make money with this” product real soon.

5. Where is the luv?

If you’re gonna put links to posts that are on other peoples blogs, why not do it for your loyal readership? Send traffic to your readers blogs, proper linkluv!

6. You could be promoting your competition

They say it only links to similar sites and articles but, if you’re in business as an affiliate or you like to promote your own stock then the last thing you want to do is send someone to another site where they can get the same thing!

7. No control on the quality of external links

I’d prefer to link to posts and blogs that I have personally found to be useful, that way the reader knows I’ve approved that site and my credibility isn’t damaged by sending someone to a high traffic splog that just happens to have some of the same things I write about! Why tell your readers, go read this on another blog, I haven’t visited it yet or endorse it but go there anyway!

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t smell anything ‘evil’ about the service, in fact, I think it’s an extremely clever way to create a buzz (not to mention create a massive list of people and their likes and dislikes), it’s just not for me, I think I’ll stick with writing good content and only linking to sites that I have found or are for the people that participate in the discussion here.

It’s a clever tool but, I think blogrush and income.com will benefit the most from it. You don’t get something for nothing when you download a tool from someone that makes money from marketing! It’s one of the first rules listed on marketers ebooks, build a list and market to it, or, provide a tool for free and then ‘upsell’ to the takers.