Code

I used a friends computer the other day and they were really surprised when I used the google search box on Firefox to do a quick sum.

he was like, “woah that’s amazing”

I was like, “dude, wtf?”

• He’s the type of guy that minimizes all the open windows one by one only to open a browser from it’s desktop icon,
• he always goes to google and types in the url to the search box and then goes and clicks the top adsense ad to get there,
• he thinks those annoying mid page ads that look like a warning dialogue box are real (every time he sees them)
• he thinks that when I went into his BIOS that I hacked into his computer via a back door, he still tells his friends about it
• he thinks he can clear up some space in his pc by deleting 150kb .dll files
• he takes literally 100 seconds to type “yes” on MSN
• he’s still trying to capture something good on camera so he can make “millions” on YouTube (he swears he read a story that YouTube pays for each play no matter what I say or show him)

it’d be funny if it wasn’t true.

Popularity: 7% [?]

Since CommentLuv got moved to the FiddyP server it has been performing quite well, I think Sharon had some trouble with the site loading slowly over the weekend and I think that’s probably to do with spam comments disprupting the script as there are times when the commentluv script that does the retrieving of the last post gets absolutely hammered.

50,000+ hits to the script each day is a fair amount, I think I need to update commentluv to ignore any comments made with a url that links direct to a file on a site rather than the root. That would probably catch a few of the spam comments from calling the remote script. I have updated the plugin recently to 1.93 but it seems as though the wordpress codex pages haven’t updated in a while. I’ll add some stuff and get it up to 1.94 and press for an update to the pages.

Here’s some hits!..

I am in the process of doing something with all the last blog posts found, right now the script just passes back the html to add to the comment being submitted but for the future I will put in some code that will store statistics in a database which will, eventually, lead to a widget for people to use to display something similar to blogrush but for their own commenters.

I might even get around to doing a back end registration site for it, it might be nice for people to be able to log into a commentluv settings page where they can choose a default feed url for their site which will be used whenever commentluv encounters their registered url.

People could promote a particular post on their page too, log in and set it to display a particular html link for any comment they make on a commentluv enabled blog.

ooh ooh, there could even be stats page to show how many sites display their last blog posts and and and…(anyone know a way to extend the hours in a day?) lol

hmm, what do you think? any ideas for back end features of a commentluv site?

Popularity: 4% [?]

Here I am looking at the new post screen on wordpress! yey. oh how I missed your light blue tones

It’s funny, I’ve been busier and had more work to do over the past weeks and months than ever before but I don’t feel as half as stressed as I used to. It must be the nice weather or I might be (shock!) getting used to the workload!

I took on a charity website job last week and completed the final touches this morning, it’s for the Newtown Santa Run in 2008 which is a record breaking gathering of people dressed as Santa who run a few miles to raise money for good causes. It’s held every year in Newtown, Powys and there’s oodles of prizes to be won and lots of money to raise for charity. Visit the Newtown Santa Run website and see what they get up to..

I promised to do a few links here and there to get it noticed so you might notice it popping up here or there until google indexes it properly…

Popularity: 5% [?]

Sorry if you’re having problems with commentluv plugin, I’ve been having real issues with my nameservers and dedicated server. I’ve moved the feed retrieving file to FiddyP.com now and I think that’s the best place for it.

Along the way of all these changes, I’ve learned not to get a dedicated server from streamline.net

I noticed that my disk usage was over 50GB and I only host 4 sites on my server, I sent them an email asking where this extra space usage was coming from and do you know what the expected me to accept as an answer??? - “that’s space taken up by the OS and plesk”

don’t make me bloody larrrrf. OS using up over 50GB? eejits

turns out it was the log files, fancy that, log files taking up 50gb. doh

Popularity: 5% [?]

Image via WikipediaWe’re now up to 1.7!! I got fed up of ” characters and other punctuation characters getting turned into ? by magpie, also, no display of Chinese or Turkish characters (thanks http://blog.mukispace.com and http://blog.mavikalemler.net/ I used your sites url to test the output of foreign language characters in UTF-8

I moved the determining of the feed location to my server now so the plugin code is a little shorter and neater. Now it should always pick up the feed location from the head of the target site, if it can’t find one there, it searches through the page content for the most likely link to a feed so as long as a feed is linked in the page, it will be picked up and parsed by commentluv.

The plugin itself should be more stable, as long as your blog hosting has the ability to CURL or access external files then it should work. If your hosting wont allow external access to files from within your scripts, be sure to ask them to whitelist the domain www.commentluv.com .

I’m running it on this post from now on so please give it a test especially if you have had problems before or you have a foreign language character set on your site.

Popularity: 5% [?]

I have finally completed the code for CommentLuv 1.0

phew! I had a mammoth amount of work to do this week but I got a few hours out of nowhere and I’ve managed to get it stable with these features:

• Options page where you can change
• Text displayed under the comment box
• Text used within the comment
  can choose to show name , site and last blog post
• Choose to enable CommentLuv by default
• Add styling to last blog post text
• Uses an external script to do the fetching
  This means that the magpie library included with wordpress doesn’t get used. Instead I try to curl a page I host on my dedicated server which outputs the last post link. If curl isn’t enabled, it tries to fetch it another way. This way I can keep the most up to date fetching routine on my server and when I update that, all people using commentluv will use the most up to date routine

I will be adding AJAX to it later but for now it is working quite stable, I need to run it on here for a few days to make sure it can behave well and then I’ll package it for a 1.0 release and put ajax in for the 1.5 release…

please feel free to make a comment and test it out for me…. thanks!

[edit]… You can download the beta testing version by clicking here Just extract and overwrite the existing file, there is an options page in the dashboard under “settings” in WP2.5

Popularity: 4% [?]

I spent a large part of last weekend coding some changes to CommentLuv, well, changing the way it can be called and how it displays posts and such. Here’s a little preview of what sort of thing it can do on a dummy form, let me know if it can’t pick up your last post or if you experience any issues with it…

This is running as just javascript and jquery without using any of the wordpress core functions and it should work on standard forms on sites that don’t have PHP enabled. I just need to tidy up the code and package it in an easy to install way and it’ll open up CommentLuv to many more platforms…yey!

I’m not 100% sure yet but this could mean a blogspot commentluv plugin, I’m trying some experiments now and so far the results are promising…

Popularity: 6% [?]