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% [?]

OMGG! (oh my golly gosh) I have had the most tremendously hard week. I’ve had 2 different web sites to produce, an hour long power point presentation for a shop display. Make a barcode program that can create a barcode from a product name, build 2 systems that can talk to each other but still be protected against outside intrusion and finally, design and print a variety of business cards for clients.

I couldn’t have done half of the coding and designing if it wasn’t for the wonderfulness of the internet!

Some sites that were instrumental to me learning new things were:

ErracticWisdom where I (finally) learned how to create a layout from scratch using css (no tables!). I used to make websites with photoshop, slice them up and save for web which would make some ugly table based pages that for lack of any other way of creating the site, had to do. The problem with table based layouts is that they are ugly, it all takes a long time to load and they don’t always behave nicely when you want to add extra content.

That problem is now solved, I took what I learned from Tom Fadial and experimented like crazy and now I am super stoked that I can create some pretty snazzy looking websites that load in a split second and are xhtml compliant. yey! thanks Tom!

Trevor Davis.net had an excellent tutorial on how to make an AJAX contact form which was absorbed, modified and implemented into my new .css based site and it turned out to be shockingly good. Enough to get me another project! Nice one Trevor!

There’s also jquery which I have been using for some experimentation lately, it’s a fantastic AJAX library which takes an awful lot of the pain out of coding AJAX pages. It’s so fantastic that you can create really simple effects and AJAX loadings in seconds.

I’ve even managed to sell a few iMaingo speakers direct from this site via Google Checkout!

Everything else has been put on hold while all these projects get completed so apologies to those wanting to see part 6 of the AJAX tutorial series, it’ll be here soon and it’ll be worth the wait!

uVme has now launched, it’s been a wait but hopefully all the kinks have been worked out and we’ll all be ready to make some money with it soon (although the site was performing poorly today). Come on VWD! get your act together, you’ve had over a year to get this right and I still can’t edit my profile. pah!

Popularity: 9% [?]

I have finally implemented AJAX into my CommentLuv plugin, it should dramatically increase the speed at which the comment gets posted after a user clicks “submit” by monitoring the comment form entry box, as soon as it gets some action then a javascript routine gets called to find the feed, scrape the last post from it and display it below the comment form.

Because the fetch_rss has a cache which it checks before it tries to open the remote feed, the last blog post will still be stored in the cache from the AJAX request so it wont need to do much at all to add the last blog post to the comment. sweet!

It’s installed and running ok here in it’s rough state so I can see how it performs while I neaten up the code so it can do all the includes and stuff automatically as well as detect another url change if the user changes their blog url after starting to comment.

At the moment it uses a bit of jquery and a bit of the AJAX goodness that you can see on the Beginners AJAX Tutorials posts, when I’ve figured out how to do it all with jquery and have it working nicely then I’ll release the new updated plugin.

It seems that a quiet Christmas morning is all that’s required to get an AJAX problem solved!

I’ll get used to jQuery and get some tutorials out there after the part 5 and 6 are done with the current series. Happy Holidays everyone!

You can always find the current version of CommentLuv here
(no AJAX in the current version yet…)

Popularity: 7% [?]