Win your own plugin!

I’ve had some phenomenal traffic and trackbacks to the CommentLuv plugin page since I made it and with all that action it has upped the plugin page to a PR of 6.

Now, I know PR isn’t so widely worshipped as much as it used to be but, PR is like money… it’s not until you have it that you realize that it’s not that important. Unless, you don’t have it and then it seems like everything will get better if only you did have it!

So here’s an idea that could get someone the fame and fortune that comes with writing a new plugin, I’ve written a few custom plugins for this site and I thought it might be nice to run a contest for the chance for someone to be the offical site for the plugin. (beware, I have had literally thousands of comments on the commentluv page! so be prepared to get a ton of your own comments if you win)

The link for the plugin page on the plugins’ dashboard page would point to the winners site.

The winners site will be the ‘official’ place for the plugin so it will be shown in the readme, on the wordpress codex download page and anywhere else someone writes a review of the plugin. If I update the plugin then I notify you and you can update the plugin release page.

The choice of plugins:

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Popularity: 1% [?]

I’ve had another few days of intensive coding and completed a few plugins that can help with the new theme.

I can’t believe that only last week I was feeling burnt out with coding! All I needed was a little “I wonder if I could …” php demon in my ear and I was off. Everything else has suffered though, I have barely talked to anyone in the past 3 days. I haven’t even answered any text messages! lol. I must be a hermit

Here’s what I’ve been up to:

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Popularity: 2% [?]

I tried to respond to a comment on my CommentLuv plugin page this morning, and I was greeted with this error,
500 Error — Internal Server Error. There has been an internal server error
oh noes!! The site was working fine for the main index page but single posts kept on throwing up a 500 error

I had a quick search of the Wordpress forums and found a variety of posts from people experiencing the same problem, each one with a different solution. I went through each solution until I revived the site back to it’s normal functionality.. here’s what I did..

1. .htaccess
   Some people had the problem because their htaccess file was not writable or their server had mod_rewrite disabled. I tried deleting the htaccess file and then going back to ‘options/permalinks’ and updating the permalink structure. The update went through with no problems (sometimes it will say “could not update htaccess” which means it is not writable by the server). The problem still persisted though..
2. wp-cache
   I thought it might be a cache problem seeing as the CommentLuv page gets so many visitors (it has a pr5 too!), I disabled the cache plugin.
   still no joy…
3. php.ini - only 8m of memory?
   I thought it might be too much memory used (I was close) so I edited php.ini in the root of my hosting folder and put this line in.
   memory_limit=16M
   Not successful
4. Too much content?
   I tried browsing to the CommentLuv page on my mobile phone once and it crashed with “out of memory” error and considering it has (atm) 199 responses, I thought that might be something to do with it. I know my stats sometimes give me a 500 internal server error when it takes a long time to load so that looked to be the problem.
   I downloaded a plugin called ‘paged-comments‘ and installed it, I particularly like the way you can stop it from paging every post and only choose which posts need paged comments by adding a custom field to the post editing screen.

   Sorted that out and tried to view the page, it loaded partly! almost there!

5. Plugin memory hog.
   On the nearly loaded page there was an out of memory error relating to sh-autolink (a plugin which automatically makes certain words in to html links) so I disabled that and SUCCESS!
   It all works fine now.

A combination of too many comments and a plugin that scans the whole text for keywords led to my 500 internal server error for Wordpress, it’s now fixed with a neat plugin and a quick removal of another. phew!

The CommentLuv plugin page is now up and working fine again, I never realized that it would get so much attention when I first drafted it. Thanks everyone for using CommentLuv!

Popularity: 4% [?]

I’ve just been playing with some javascript to slide open a DIV tag, it’s really useful for my HelloStumbler plugin because it waits until the page is loaded and if the surfer came from Stumbleupon, it slides down a small DIV at the beginning of the post saying hello and requesting a thumbs up.
See the slide happen

Pretty cool eh? lol, It took a fair bit of fiddling about so I’ll see if I can update HelloStumbler to take all the pain out of it.

I learned it all at Harry Maugans blog, you can see the whole javascript here: Sliding/Collapsing Div

I noticed a HUGE spike in traffic last night for the Hide a rar file in a jpeg post, thanks to those whole gave me a thumbs up!

edit: I’ve also added a bit to detect if the surfer came via a Google search and display that instead. I might develop this a bit further and see what other detections I can put in there. That should be pretty easy, the tough bit comes when I want to make it into a configurable plugin easy enough to use for new bloggers!

Try this link to a google search for Hello Stumbler, click the 1st one down (or maybe lower by the time you read this) to come to a post here and you can see the google detection bit kick in when the page has fully loaded. yey!

Popularity: 8% [?]