It’s a rainy day outside and I’m just in the mood for coding! First I have to plough through all the comments and see if I can get a decent reply up, visit the site and hopefully make a meaningful comment.

I played with the database code for CommentLuv last night and successfully got a page up and working showing blogs that I have received comments from but not recipricated which was pretty cool, problem is that I noticed that I need to restructure the tables in the database and the code that populates it! arrrgh, just when I was about to switch it on for the whole of the commentluv userbase… luckily I got it in time so I can make the changes without too much fuss.

I think I’ll work on the commentluv site for a bit today, change some css and get the general layout the way I want it. That should take the best part of a couple of days (which in realilty means it’ll be all week!) at least I’ll remain dry throughout…

Popularity: 1% [?]

I really enjoy coding and making new things but sometimes, when there’s a schedule to keep and posts to tidy up and I can’t get on with one thing until I have tidied up something else then it can be a bit of a bind.

You see, I can really get into some new piece of code or software and get the greatest of pleasure from being ‘in the zone’ while I keep the whole flow of the program in my head while I add or edit a function. Things seem to just fit together right.

Some of the solutions I have come up with for a particular bug or output error freak me out!. When I go back and look at the code after a few weeks, I think, “how the hell did I come up with that?” lol
It gets me inspired to try something new or make a small ‘fix’ in something I’ve been trying out.

Most of the time, my coding sessions start with a “I wonder if…” thought when I see something that looks cool on another site or plugin, then I try a little 10 or 20 line bit of code to see a new function or class work and before you know it, it’s 8 hours later and I’m dying for a pee and my ‘little test’ has turned into a mammoth program! I just love it when that happens, everything outside of my workstation didn’t happen, bodily functions, friends calling, work, play, everything! nought exists except the screen in front of me and the lines of code displayed on it.

It’s the awesomes.

Seeing the code work, that’s amazing too! even more so if it’s useful

… if the program is for me then that’s usually where the coding stops (and the coding comedown happens where I feel all superior for a few hours)

..it’s all the safeguards and data valildation I have to put in to counteract spammers or the error checks I need to put in for people that don’t know how to RTFM. It’s the constant support for people that shouldn’t be allowed a computer! although, helping people does feel really good but, not when it goes like this…

Q. your program is good, how do I use it?
A. there are instructions displayed where you downloaded it
Q. where is that?
A. <sigh>

I luv programming, it’s the other crap that pisses me off !

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Here's a little line of javascript that will work in Firefox to reveal the * characters in an auto populated password field. Just paste the following code into your browser address bar whenever you see an asterisked form field and press enter..

Useful if if you want to access your sisters email account you forget a password that gets auto filled.

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I've been too lazy to transfer my holiday photos from my camera since I cam back (because then everyone will crowd around my computer and ooh and ahh at every.single.picture - even the ones of a thumb obscuring the lens) instead though, I have bitten the bullet and finally got around to creating some Mysql tables for the remote script that does the fetching of the last blog post for commentluv plugin users.

What does this mean? ..
it means that I can create a site for people to register their blog url and with that :

• set a default cache timeout for speedier processing of their comments on blogs that use the plugin.
• define a default RSS feed url to be used for their domain
  (will also make retrieving a little quicker)
• define a default link and anchor text to be used
  (useful for pointing to a particular post in the past on comments you make on commentluv sites or if your feed has an error)
• choose to use default link and anchor text instead of your feeds last entry
  (useful for when you go on a comment campaign)
• make your last blog post links open in a new window
  (on sites you comment on)

Other things I will be able to do with the upcoming commentluv site now I'm using a database to store data..

• Show you the last 10 blogs with commentluv that you commented on
• Show you the last 10 comments with a last blog post made on your blog
• Show the top 10 blogs that comment on your blog
• Show the top 10 blogs that you comment on (that have commentluv)
• Show which blogs have commented on you that you haven't commented on
  (thanks to Bobby Revellian who requested something to keep a track of which blogs he has commented on and which blogs he needs to comment on. I know it was literally half a year ago bobby but it's taken me until now to learn enough stuff to make it possible!)
• probably a lot more...:-)

If there's more things you'd like to be able to do with commentluv on your blog or features you'd like to see for a commentluv site please leave a comment here and let me know... (btw.. I am using a new version of commentluv on this site that uses the new remote script and database, if you get any issues with comments going funny please let me know on the contact page)

..oh, one more thing... ajax commentluv is a little more improved, it can now work with almost any blog that allows you to edit the header of your theme! .. it's still a little way off from a release but it seems to be working well ... stay tuned!

Popularity: 2% [?]

I bought a book recently after seeing it mentioned in the WP dashboard news items, it's called Wordpress Theme Design by Tessa Blakeley Silver and although a lot of the information regarding the functions of wordpress can be found at the codex, the book gives you so much more like the process gone through to design a theme from scratch.

I do quite a lot of sites in wordpress now and find it much easier to provide a client with a website that can be updated so easily, a few plugins here and there and you can provide a website that does all and more that's needed.

Usually I get a standard theme and cut it up a bit and change the css to give me my site, or create in photoshop and send off for wordpressing but lately due to some more custom design requests I've received and the always dependable mistakes that freelancers can make I have wanted to do the whole thing myself from scratch..

I've downloaded a tutorial before about WP theme design from small potato before it was taken over and that was pretty darn useful but was made a little while ago so it wasn't 2.5 specific.

That's why I like what Tessa has put her book, it takes you step by step through the process of creating a non-blog wordpress blog, from sketch to WP core code. It's made a big difference to my initial prototyping of concept sites and has really opened my eyes to what you can do with a bit of manipulation of the wordpress template tags. I'm even working on a magazine style front page for here so I can have a featured post for contests that stays up while it's open for entries as well as excerpts to the regular posts..

You can buy the book printed or get it as pdf for a bit cheaper (I printed mine out from pdf on someone elses printer lol!) at packet publishing

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

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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% [?]