FiddyP

Name:
Time: 00:0:mun
Referring site: er:imgames

Name: Andreas w
Time: 01:53:64
Referring site: imgames.co.uk

Name:
Time: 02:1:28:
Referring site: armatrix:imgames

I love it when I get in a coding frenzy! I did a little 3 line php script today to see if I could play with an XML file and display some code with the contents and I ended up spending the whole day deep in my monitor fiddling with strings and substrings, I ended up with an auto updating top3 leaderboard for the aqua game.

If I’m honest, it should have only taken an hour to write but it’s been quite a while since I did any coding but I really enjoyed a relaxed Sunday being geeky again!

I’ve added the top 3 table to the game page on imgames and also on the post here showing the game, hopefully that will drum up some more interest… So far, there have only been a few people manage to get on the hiscore table. Most of them have come through a stumble, maybe the game is a little bit too hard or boring.. I dunno, what do you think of it?

oh, I added another way to link to the game with your own referral code so I can send you a prize if someone wins after coming through the link on your site. It’s as simple as adding your site or email address as the friend option on the end of the game url. eg.

http://www.imgames.co.uk/play-aqua-game.php?friend=putyoursiteoremailhere

Be sure to visit the imgames and register yourself and your site or you wont be qualified to get the prize if one of your referrals wins!..

Popularity: 5% [?]

It seems CommentLuv is enjoying an upsurge of installs again, this usually happens when a big blogger like The Brown Baron, Revellian, Howtospoter or John Cow installs it and gives it a mention so I thought I had better address some (small) issues with it and give it a rewrite.

I’ve sketched out the first draft of the flow chart which is a good reminder in my own mind of how things link together. It’s a chart that will expand further and take up more and more space, from experience I think it will take another 4 or 5 sketches to get the full flow down on paper and then I can take that and refine and expand it to take into account the individual functions and then I can start on the coding proper!

Some things I am going to put in this new version…

• Options Page
  • Change displayed text under comment area
  • Change styling options for last blog post display
  • Change message for last blog post display
  • Option to use external script for blogs with no curl support
  • Setting for how hard the plugin should look for the feed
  • Setting for enable CommentLuv by default
  • Timeout setting for MAGPIE
• AJAX support for background fetching during comment entry*
• Include MAGPIE library in plugin directory**
• Tidy up WP_OPTIONS function for older versions of CommentLuv

* Use jquery to call the function after the comment author URL field loses focus, this will store the authors feed in the cache so when the user submits the comment, the feed in the cache will be used. This will prevent any hanging around after the comment has been submitted while the plugin searches for the feed location.

** Currently, there are some cases of the default include of MAGPIE saving each and every feed cache to the WP database in WP_OPTIONS/OPTION_NAME which tends to make it grow quite large, also some users have reported it being set to “autoload on” which can have an effect on load times. This wont happen if I use a separate MAGPIE include.

So, that’s it, those are my ideas for the new version of CommentLuv. Do you have any suggestions for things you’d like to see?

Popularity: 3% [?]

Hurrah! another Euromillions rollover which means there’s an easy peasy way for you to win a set of iPod portable speakers just by leaving a comment on this post…(retail value 59.99GBP / 120USD)

Give me your guess for the two lucky star numbers in a comment here and if you guess the two correct numbers between 1 and 9 for this Fridays’ Euromillions draw, you win!

Check out these awesome speakers…

The contest is open to everyone worldwide and finishes on Friday 4th April so get your guesses in now…(you don’t even have to pay for postage)

About Euromillions

A rollover happens quite regularly on the Euromillions and is worth millions of tax free lump sum money!, you’ll have a much better chance to win a prize if you play in a syndicate with elottery because we guarantee that your syndicate will match both lucky star numbers on every single draw!!! Have a browse of my elottery site to see how we can make this promise…

Popularity: 3% [?]

I had to do some playing around with my wordpress database when I wanted to move my install from a shared hosting to a dedicated server (which turned out to be quite easy!) and I went in a bit further to phpmyadmin to see what other things I could do.

With the current release of my new contest game, Aqua Craft, I wanted to let everyone that has visited here know about it and rather than wait for every single commenter to come back and see the post, I thought it might be easier to extract the email addresses of all commenters from the database and send them all a message. (luckily, only one person replied saying it was spam!).

I checked my wp_comments table and it had a few thousand entries, yey! I thought. I’ll send them all a message! I extracted the table into a csv file and was disappointed to see literally hundreds and hundreds of spammer email addresses in there…

Not being a mysql database geek, I did some searching and found a way to extract all the addresses of the commenters that had been approved… here’s how…

1.) Log in to phpmyadmin
2.) select the wp_comments table on the left and click the “browse” button on comment_author_email

3.) Click “edit” on the mysql statment at the top of the page and change it to the following

SELECT * FROM `wp_comments` WHERE `comment_approved` = ‘1′

That will show you a list of all the comments made that have been approved.

4.) Click on the “export” tab and select these options..

This will give you a large .csv file ready to be opened by Excel

5.) Open the file in excel which will give you this..

This is a lot more than we need, so delete the columns for comment id, comment content etc so you’re left with comment_author, comment_author_email and comment_author_url

6.) Your excel file should look like this…

Now there will be a lot of duplicate email addresses from multiple commenters but if you have a decent newsletter or mass email program, you should be able to import this file and let it filter out all the dupes and discard the trackbacks and pings.

Easy peasy! I ended up with a few hundred email addresses who I could tell about my latest contest.. awesome…

Popularity: 3% [?]

Another round of great blogs that use CommentLuv, now there’s even more chance to see CommentLuv blogs because Paul from imafish.co.uk has converted my code into a Drupal version. Nice one Paul!

http://www.kidazy.com/ is a great looking site that provides reviews on toys and games for children age 0 and up. I like what Amy has done with the layout and the attention she gives to each product. Much more than a “whack up a product picture and affiliate” blog. Worth checking out if you have kids (and money!)

http://www.thenetfool.com is an up and coming John Cow/Chow blog with some quite in-depth reviews of marketing and advertising products, see his post on Project Wonderful

http://menstrualpoetry.com/ is a blog that caught my eye because of it’s URL. Menstrual poetry! lol. On further inspection, the blog is definitely one for the ladies with posts such as The truth about prostitution and Voting for Hillary just because she is a woman (which turns out to be a balanced and sensible read..”Feminism is a movement that is based on equality and being granted the same rights and freedoms that men have, so by voting for a woman candidate just because she’s a woman, aren’t we taking a step in the wrong direction?”)

http://www.untwistedvortex.com/ is a fantastically useful site to visit, check out Richards excellent post about how to combat splogs and get your pagerank back after being penalized by google.

http://www.johncow.com/ is a blog I am sure you know, he’s just started using CommentLuv to encourage people to jump from a feed reader to his posts to leave their opinion. Show you care and leave him a (relevant) comment!

Popularity: 2% [?]