I’ve seen quite a few blogs using CommentLuv now which is fantastic and I see a lot of comments about blog authors finding more great blogs by following the links to the last blog post but, I see some places not picking up everyones last post because their hosting does not allow Curl commands which is what I use for parsing the comment authors page, they can still use the fetch_rss() function so I have created some external hosting for a script that takes a URL, parses that page and outputs a feed with the location of the feed.

I’ve added a bit to the plugin that calls that external file if the hosting it is installed on doesn’t allow Curl commands, it can read the result because it doesn’t need to open it as a file using file and fopen commands.

I have found it is quicker to parse the users page first rather than try all the combinations of the default locations because each try can take up to 5 seconds (or whatever you put as the MAGPIE_TIMEOUT) which isn’t ideal. Now with the option of every blog being able to parse the users page first it shouldn’t take too long and because the rss functions of wordpress uses a cache when it reads a feed, when someone comes back and writes another comment on your blog, the plugin will use the location it found last time because it will be stored as a feed in the cache. yey!

I’ve also added a check box to allow the user to not add their last blog post, this is if you want to leave a comment asking a splog that is using commentluv to stop scraping your content (you wouldn’t want to leave a link to your blog on a splog) or if you are commenting on your own blog from elsewhere without being logged on and don’t want your last post shown.

I’ve made it easier to change the message that is displayed below the comment form too. Just edit the bit in the quotes in the source code below the changelog.

The Future
I am in the middle of learning event listeners so I can really cut the time down for parsing the page by doing it AJAX style after the user has entered their blog url and clicks to the comment area to make their entry. This should make CommentLuv almost completely transparent and prevent any longer than necessary waits after submitting the comment.

I imagine that will be after Christmas as well as adding language support and it’s own options page. I have purposely kept away from using extra tables in the WP database because, A) I don’t want to mess up an existing database, B) I haven’t used MySQL before, and C) I don’t know how! (yet)

Much later than that, I want to create a widget style box for displaying links to your commenters posts (Cliq style). I am sure I can add Gravatars to it too but that will require storing the last blog posts in the database in their own table.

You can download version 0.997 of CommentLuv here (one-click installer plugin users can use this link http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/commentluv.zip)

AJAX tutorials

Tutorial 4 is ready and will be published tomorrow. I have seen quite a few hits coming in for them so I have spent a bit more time trying to add some graphical explanations for each process in the script to make it a little easier to follow. I have part 5 all planned out so that part 6 can see you creating your own AJAX scripts. Maybe some homework assignments to send out?

Alexa Ranking

I am pleased to see my traffic going up a bit each week. The largest referrer is Stumbleupon with a steady stream of hits coming in as well as a few sharks fin spikes in my stats. I think that has helped with me getting close to the sub 100,000 mark for my alexa rank which, today is at 106,955. For just the sites visited by UK users, I am very close to being in the top 10,000 visited sites. (I can see it now, “FiddyP makes it to the top 10⁴ UK sites”)

Happy Hanuka/Christmas/Holidays/Eed Al-Adha (delete as appropriate)!

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