Another Wordpress Blog

Even if you don’t read this post, please comment! I need some comments for testing.

I’m planning a new release of L’s Linky Love by Friday. The reason for the release is simple: I received a few requests for additional features/ fixes to ‘s Linky Love; two were easy so I added them. I also added another feature I thought up myself. I’ve installed my updated version and I’m requesting comments to help me verify all the functions are still working .

Meanwhile, to give you something to comment one here are the features / fixes / hidden improvements in this release:

1. Time Delay:
   In addition to the previous matching, the blogger can now include a time delay. This was requiested by Steve Cronin of More then Scratch the Surface. I’ve set this to 1 day for today; I plan to set it to zero after today because I think the other checks are sufficient for my blog and blogging habits.
2. Bug fix:
   I rewrote the way I find the date of the most recent published blog post because they way I did it causes problems for at least one version of MySQL. The new way uses WordPress functions, and so should work for anyone who manages to get wordpress to work. The bug was found by Aaron of milienzo.com
3. Name exclusion:
   The new plugin lets you excluse one “name” from being dofollowed. This is my own idea; the explanation follows.
4. CPU saving efforts:
   I did some Googling and discovered I can save a little CPU by modifying the MySQL ‘count(*)’ to ‘count(1).’ So, I changed that. I also reorganized some of the internal logic to make sure the “dofollow” logic granting code is exited as soon as we know the comment won’t be followed. This will save a small amount of CPU. These changes should have no visible effect, but since I made quite a few, I need to get a bunch of comments so I can verify!

A more major release to let us drill down and find old spam is planned after I get the “little” tweaks done.

Now, I think I should explain one of the features, as no one asked for it!

Why exclude one “name” from being dofollowed?

I noticed I lost page rank for my name after installing a dofollow plugin; I dropped from about 14 to who knows where.

My theory is that suddenly flooding my own knitting blog with internal links with the same anchor text set off Google’s google-bomb alert. If my theory is true, this will be a risk with all dofollow plugins.

I actually sort of like not appearing early on searches for my first name only. However, some people may hate losing rank for the name they use for comments at their own blogs.

In any case, I also realized I don’t really want to create even more internal links to my index page in comments. (The internal link issue will not be a problem for bloggers who have consistently logged in when leaving their own comments.

Anyway, to fix this, I coded the “name exclusion” option. I “exclude” my name from being ‘dofollowed’.

Now, please comment! (Especially if you’ve commented before

If I get a number of comments from newer and older visitors, I’ll be able to test the day exclusion fully and make sure I haven’t introduced any bugs while reorganizing the logic. (Comments from people other than me are essential. So are a few new comments so I can test the 1 day delay. )

This entry was posted on Monday, August 6th, 2007 at 12:32 pm and is filed under DoFollow, L'sLinkyLove, My Plugins, Plugins, WordPress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.