I must say thanks to the following people who have helped me get the Ajax version of CommentLuv to an installable beta state…

1. tata from imnotbeautifullikeyou.com who was the very first blog to have a installable plugin of ACL - thanks so much for the repeated re-install of the plugin to get it to a semi-working state, it really helped having you reply so quickly
2. Pacuraru Ovidiu from Zice.ro for checking for compatibility with Mu.
3. Jon from Beauty Salon Marketing for finding the kinky slash that threw a spanner in the works. (spanner removed!)
4. Byteful Traveller from Byteful Blog for making the fine looking badge used on the bottom of the comment form

I put the link to the beta version as a reply to a comment on a post from a few days ago and it’s been downloaded nearly 50 times! Either some people are lurking in the background or someone is click happy!

The new version of the Ajax CommentLuv plugin and supporting site are still in early beta but do seem to work. There’s probably some i’s to dot and t’s to cross but that’s what beta releases are all about!

The major feature is it finds the post while the visitor is typing their comment which speeds up comment posting and reduces load on the server as it’s all done on the browser side. It’ll reduce the load on my server to because it’s called with javascript and most ‘bots don’t parse that.

If you feel like being a bit of a tester, here’s the temporary download link. Please give your comments in the support forum if you have issues and I’ll do my best to fix any errors as and when they come.

Popularity: 1% [?]

I have managed to get AjaxCommentLuv working quite nicely! I’ve even added support for Wordpress MU (I think). It works with logged in users who aren’t administrators on the CommentLuv site.

I wonder if I should enter this to the Wordpress MU plugin contest? it might get it some good exposure!

Anyone out there with Wordpress MU willing to give this first draft a try to see if AjaxCommentLuv works with your multi-user site? if you do, please let me know in the comments..

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Popularity: 1% [?]

Version: 1.98(updated on 21 August 2008)

PLEASE UPDATE IF YOUR VERSION IS BELOW 1.98

Comments are a wonderful thing to receive on your blog, adding the dofollow plugin is one way to reward but why not place a link to their last post under their comment, with CommentLuv, you can do that automatically! This is an excellent way to promote comments from your readers.

example:

The CommentLuv Wordpress Plugin will visit the feed of the comment author and attempt to scrape the last post they made and display it under their comment, this way you can encourage people to join in the discussion of your posts and give something back straight away.

The plugin looks for a feed at the site given in the URL field of the commentform, if you have an auto find feed then it should find it.

The plugin retrieves your last post at the time of the comment being posted and appends the extra text just before the comment gets saved to the database, this way it doesn’t put any extra load on the database or server other than the effort required add another 60 or so characters to the comment content.
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Popularity: 11% [?]

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: 5% [?]

I’ve been away from fiddyp for a while but not away from wordpress as I’ve been working really hard on some WP based sites that have turned out pretty well using WP as a CMS combined with some useful and custom plugins.

It’s pretty amazing what you can do with some customized templates and a bit of hacking the code here and there so I thought I’d list some of the useful tools I work with to make life a little bit easier.

Cforms II

This is a really easy plugin to use straight out of the box just by entering <!–cforms–> onto a post or page where you want the contact form to appear.

Select which fields you want in the options page and you can’t get a simpler contact form made on Wordpress!

It can be used in a more complex way too, it has options for AJAX, custom fields and even a file upload function. Get into the code some more and there are ways to generate custom contact forms within the wordpress template code so for example, you could generate a “request more information on this product” form on a product listing which has the product code automatically inserted as a hidden field which will be sent along with the contacts details and message.

You can read more about Cforms II and download the latest version at
http://www.deliciousdays.com/cforms-plugin

It works well and is constantly being updated with new features and options.
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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% [?]