I AM A BIG DOPE

I’m so sorry everyone for doing 3 codex updates in the past few hours.

It’s all my fault, feel free to stick another pin in the voodoo doll.

version 2.1.5 is now the proper, final, it should bloody work on all sites now release.

You can download here
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/commentluv/

Popularity: 2% [?]

I just checked the changelog of commentluv and I realized that I’ve been coding just about every day and night since the 1st of this month!!

OMG. I had to learn all sorts of crapperoo for mysql and jquery for the CommentLuv.com site but boy-o-boy it’s been worth it!!

I have a recent luv working on the site and the click tracking seems to be going ok.

I have just added the top 20 sites using CommentLuv in the past 24 hours based on comments received.

and now, I am so in need of a day off or two that it’s killing me!! I’ll try to keep on top of things but I’ve received over 100 comments in the past 24 hours and made a lot more trying to get as many sites as possible that had small issues with not knowing their ID values or sorting out styling so I think I need to rest a bit…. until…I can put in some code that will allow users to use the traditional style of commentluv rather than the AJAX version. hehe LOL I am a gluten for punishment!

I think I have a solution to the spam problem with the old version, the remote script gets hit every time a comment is submitted on any blog running the old version and that includes all the autobot spam which is a bit of a pisser for my hosting so I think I can add something to the code that will do the ajax bit invisibly and if it didn’t work, do the fetch after the comment is submitted but before it gets saved to the database only if some javascript hidden value is set in the form which might make the comments received stats a lot more accurate.

anyhooo, I’m literally falling asleep at the keyboard and I have muchos to do that has nothing to do with chips or databases or comments or even a computer.. oh the bliss…

Popularity: 1% [?]

Right on the back of the final version 2.1 I have decided to release 2.15 which addresses some things that people have been emailing me about since they upgraded. If you’re not good at upgrading plugins, don’t worry! if your commentluv works for you then you don’t need to update if you don’t want to.

The updates…

1. You can choose no image to be displayed below the comment form
2. You can use text instead of an image to be displayed below the comment form
3. A reset to default settings box in case you mess up the values and can’t remember what they were!
4. Updated jQuery code to make it more compatible with other javascripts running on the page

Watch out in your dashboard for the update notice! Or use this link to get the latest 2.1.5 version
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/commentluv/

thanks to Jacob from http://justcreativedesign.com/ for the feedback and Joe from http://imwithjoe.com for creating a mystery suitable for the Scooby Doo gang and the others who are deep in my history page and cannot be found (I must have browsed through hundreds of sites since I saw your feedback so I can’t find your urls to show)

I didn’t really want to update the plugin so soon but since imwithjoe.com and johncow.com have updated there have been a lot of commentluv.com registrations and oodles of downloads so I think I should address this asap. oh, CommentLuv has just gone over 20,000 downloads from the WP Codex ! yey.

Popularity: 2% [?]

I like kids, I couldn’t eat a whole one but they are cute and fun to play with and it is possible to be this way with all kids and me only because I give them back to their parents.

It’s kind of like that with another blog. It’s great fun to try and put different posts up but tedious after a while. It’d be nice to do the fun bits (for me as a geek) and leave the telling the stories to someone who is experiencing them. I tried having two blogs and more but all would suffer from me being stretched between them all but, it’s nice to build a site and get it traffic and commenters and be able to share something with someone, anyone, it doesn’t matter! but, it gets hard to constantly come up with one blogs posts let alone 3!

Luckily, my best mate Diego has been pressganged into serving on the Royal Caribbean Cruise liner, “The Brilliance” and will be out of my hair has decided he wants to start a blog about his adventures around the Mediterranean Sea and I thought, “Great! makey makey, codey codey and I don’t have to worry about the updates to the posts!”

I’m probably going to have to train him by video step by step on how to do it the Wordpress way so what better way of doing than sharing it all here over this blog? In a couple of weeks, there’ll be some tutorial videos made mainly for my mate of spanish blood but also good enough for your average newb to learn how to setup and create a blog.

He’s already written the first two posts and sent them to me ready to load up on the new site, they’re good reading and I think with a healthy supply of photos taken from all the major tourist ports of Europe and surrounding coastlines it’ll be a great place to see nice things and funky places to go if you’re ever in a city like Palermo or Venice or the South of France.

Funky passive advertising opportunity on the horizon!! toot toot!

Popularity: 1% [?]

Thanks to all the beta testers of CommentLuv, release 13 is the most stable and compatible version yet. I don’t wanna tempt fate but if everything works as well ‘out there’ as it does on my test machines and servers then it will be updated on the codex so everyone will get notified of the new version and we can all start seeing it spread to the existing v1.99 blogs.

I’ve been deep in code and frantically checking each and every site that has activated the beta version and in nearly all cases have managed to see the plugin working on those who’ve tried it.

I have a small tradition I like to do when I’m deep in a project and that’s to not shave from when I start it to when I feel comfortable that there’s only cosmetic changes to come.

here’s me before I started coding this new version and site

and this is me after using my awesome Wilkinson Sword quatro with beard trimmer (6th week without changing a blade and beard trimming twice a week) that cost a measly 3.50GBP best.razor.ever!

and another looking more serious…

hurray, smooth skin means success in something. I must admit that I like the bristles, they give me something other than a cigarette to fiddle with while I’m thinking. My missus likes them too

There have been a couple of sites that required me to change the plugin code but mostly this was to make it compatible with other not-so-well-behaving ajax scripts and wotnot. This new version takes out the onsubmit event altogether which makes things much less prone to being tripped up by other scripts that listen to the comment form (ajax preview, threaded comments). You can download it in the usual place or click here

Happy commenting, please give it a test here. I tried every combination of error, not found, blank result, resubmitted comment and mess up I could and it seemed ok.

Popularity: 2% [?]

I’m really happy with how commentluv.com is going and the plugin seems to be working ok, there are a few blogs that need to change some settings in the settings page but mainly it’s ok.

I’ve added click tracking to logged on admin users now and fixed the problem of an apostrophe causing the script to break.

The site has a new guest writer who will be in charge of writing the CommentLuv featured site posts, the first one is up and there are many more to come! Thanks Sire for writing the review!

Stats are a little improved.

I think there is one change I would like to make in the way the code works, I think it will be better to leave the adding of the comment by listening for the submit event out, instead I think it is better to populate another field on the form with the relevant text and add it when the comment is processed using the appropriate filter built into wordpress.

I guess this was supposed to be the way it should have been done but I was concentrating on getting it to work without needing wordpress other than for the settings page but I think it will be more compatible with other javascripts that listen or affect the comment fields if I do it this new way instead.

I’ve only seen a couple of blogs that would need this to be compatible but where there’s 2 yaddy yaddy yaddah

Popularity: 2% [?]

I was discussing the horridness of London with the family last night and was giving several examples of how cak it is in this dirty, expensive, cold hearted shitty city.

During the discussion, the news was on and a report came on about the latest soldiers to die in Afghanistan and someone pipped in, “hey, it could be worse! you could be fighting a war in a foreign country and get shot tomorrow”.

Hmmm, really? Now, there’s this thing called the interwebs that can haz sum infoes 2 b seenz.

I sent lulzcat to work, tappety tap tap taroo …. and we get some facts…. continue

Popularity: 1% [?]

What I need

I need some help to get CommentLuv through it’s last hoop before I can release it to the world at large and my deadline for that is 25th September 2008 - the last day to enter a plugin for the Wordpress MU Plugin Contest

That’s where (I hope) you come in. I have the plugin working nicely on a few blogs and the click tracking and stats are showing results for my wee group of test beds but I need a larger scale test… I’ve removed all the bugs that I can see and I’m confident that it wont do any damage because it doesn’t touch the database and most of the work is done on the client side through javascript.

The only interaction it has with the wordpress code is to listen for a single post action, if it’s a single post it puts the correct javascript in the header and that’s it. The majority of the code is the settings page and action hook code.

What you could get

Money! I’ll tell you about the money now before you get bored and miss the rest
$100 dollars by Paypal (or equivalent prize in Amazon or other voucher of your choice) for some lucky person who helps me over the next few days to a week by doing the things detailed below. The winner will be decided by the randomness of the UK lottery on Saturday 26th (1 day after the guaranteed 100 Million Euromillions jackpot which must be won!). I’ll split up the 49 numbers available equally (yes I know 49 doesn’t divide well unless it’s a 7 but we’ll work something out) between everyone and publish them at 6pm, whoever gets a match with the bonus number drawn wins the moolah.

Not just that, part of this is making and receiving comments to see if it behaves on a large scale and for that there will be a list of all those participating viewable only to those participating where you can find blogs that give 10x the luv (see how below) which will increase your traffic/readership/luv rating and more! (obviously, this needs a few people to help, I can’t do it with just 5!)

The technical bits ( )

Don’t worry! it’s not hard, just as easy as installing a plugin and registering your url with the hub site (and dancing naked in the rain).

it goes like this…

For people with Wordpress own hosted blogs only

1

Download the beta of CommentLuv (version 10 pre final) and Install.

Download CommentLuv (right click and copy url to use the one click plugin updater if you use it)

If you already have CommentLuv please deactivate it first and then upload the commentluv folder overwriting the existing one and activate it in the dashboard plugins page. Go straight to the commentluv settings page under settings/commentluv and see the bit at the bottom about entering your field ID’s (it sounds nastier than it is).

You can see in your theme’s comments.php what your comment form uses for identifying the form, the name field, the url field and the comment input area. If it uses ID= then use that in the settings or if it uses name= ,enter the value in the settings page and choose “name” as the type.

There are some screenshots here at the Ajax CommentLuv Plugin page over at CommentLuv.com

It sometimes works right out the box because the default ID’s I put in there have worked on a few blogs without any need for changing. It depends on who designed your theme. Other ways to find out are to click and drag over your comment form while you are logged out of your blog and view the selection source (in firefox) or use the developer toolbar to show form information.

2

Register your url at CommentLuv.com

Pop over to my sister site CommentLuv.com and register like you would with any normal Wordpress blog. Activate your registration and visit the settings page (http://www.commentluv.com/settings) whilst logged on.

There you can register your blog URL (preferably where you’ll be installing the plugin) and you will be given some code to display a verification image on your blog home page (the page pointed to by the URL you register). Once you place the code on your site you can come back to the settings page at commentluv.com and click “verify”. The site will then visit your url and look for the code.

If all goes well and it can see your site and verification it will be ready to rok (so it says)

Set your feed cache age and if you want see if it can find your feed automatically. If it can’t then you can enter it in manually if you like (although it all works better if your site has an autofindable feed which is standard in wordpress blogs)

Check for your Commentluv member ID and enter it in the box located on the plugin settings page on your blog dashboard, check that click tracking is enabled (ticked) and update your settings.

3

Register at the support forum

yes I know there’s a whole lorra registering going on but they’re all under one roof and not with any shady company and it’s all to do with CommentLuv. There you’ll be able to report any errors or suggestions and I wont need to use some sort of mass email script and email people all the time. gosh I love forums and blogs! emailing is a right pain in the arsebone. I just cannae be bothered with it!, I hate saying the same things and giving the same answers over and over again (except giving links to pages that say the things I’ve said over and over again) but… anyhoooooo

Done!

All that’s left to do is use commentluv by visiting the the blogs who use the new version and see how it plays with others. Return to the CommentLuv site often and see if the stats make sense for what you’re seeing yourself and report any anomalies or strange behaviour at the forum.

Because I will be releasing this to the plugin contest I would love for you to love it and vote for it when the time comes, it might get some more exposure and I’ll be sure to have a permanent part of the about page showing links to the people who help. New users will want to start using the plugin when it’s final as soon as possible and the links page would be a perfect place for them to start clicking through to ajax commentluv enabled blogs. (that could be you!)

Please leave a comment here or at the forum to say you’re participating

The Links:
CommentLuv Beta plugin file
CommentLuv.com hub site
FiddyP Support Forum

Popularity: 3% [?]

Oh how I love it when I’m in the zone! ovidiu from Zice has been helping me with the MU compatibility tests with the new CommentLuv (up to 2.0b r9) and we had some issues because his comment form uses name attributes for some of the fields and the plugin needed to use the ID values.

He mentioned that there are 100’s of themes made available for MU and it would be a pain to have to edit every single one to use ID attributes. At first I thought this was going to be some sort of herculean effort but it turned out my geekness surprised even me when the solution came to me so I have now updated the code to allow users to choose between name or ID for the identification of the relevant fields which should make it much easier for your average n00b to install and use CommentLuv

While I was at it, I improved the look of the commentluv.com settings page for registered users. It should make it much easier for someone to verify their site quickly and start to receive 10x the luv when they comment.

I think I’ll release it to the Wordpress MU plugin contest tomorrow or the next day. It seems to be working quite well now on the few blogs that I’ve tried it on. The big test is when the masses start using it, the original plugin has been downloaded over 17000 times at the codex pages on wordpress.org!

You can download the beta version of CommentLuv here

Popularity: 2% [?]

I have a head full of ideas on what to do with CommentLuv and I’m pleased how it has come so far but I think I’m in danger of feature creep with the addition of the click tracking function. I think I shall keep this off by default and label it experimental.

I think CommentLuv is useful for quite a few reasons, one of them is finding great blogs from the interesting title under their comments and it’s nice to see a connection between commenters (I know it’s commentators but you know what I mean). I really would like to see the stats for how many blogs have reciprocal commenters and how man blogs share commenters. That would be really interesting to see, the raw data I am getting now is interesting but when I get a good interface for displaying it then it will be really interesting in w00t kind of way.

I have a busy week ahead and I know I was supposed to release the stable version this weekend but I think there are very few little things left to fix and maybe I can go ahead with the full version next week.

In the meantime, you can download the very latest version which appears to be going quite well here

Download Beta

now compatible with Brians Threaded Comments

Just deactivate the old one, upload the new one overwriting the folder and then activate again. Please check the settings page in the dashboard/settings/commentluv and of course let me know if you get any problems.

Popularity: 2% [?]