Can I come out to play yet? .. nope (nearly)!

WARNING: This is a long assed post!

I’m nearly there!

I am just a week or 2 (or 3) away from finishing the immensely intense project that I started on 1st December to create a brand new ePoS system for our family Chinese Takeout & Delivery shop in Lancaster, UK (and yes I know the site needs a redesign!).

It was supposed to be over by the end of December but, it has turned out to be a behemoth of a project. I never expected to become so involved with it. It’s been a series of surprises and each one has made me appreciate the old system more and more!

To bring us into the 21st century, I decided to create a new system completely from scratch using PHP and MySQL and take advantage of the WordPress plugin system so it’ll be easy(er) to update and perhaps be turned into a commercial product. To make things easier, I am coding it in conjunction with the Genesis theme framework. by golly, Genesis is good! it makes things an awful lot easier to deal with and the advantage is that I can change themes and all the hooks and widgets still work! woot!

The good news is that it can handle everything that the old system did and a bazillion things more like integrated google maps so when a customer calls (and my custom Windows 7 caller id app opens a browser) I can see a street map, satellite view and even the google streetview image of their front door as soon as they call. Oh, and also the time it takes to drive there and the exact route.

I could go on for hours and hours what else it’s got but I’m afraid I’ll bore the hell out of you! enough said that it’s frickin brilliant and no Chinese delivery shop anywhere else in this country will have something as powerful or easy to use. Sweet (and sour :p).

It’s not done though so I’m still working hard at it. I’ll be done soon (lol, who am I kidding? hehe, it’ll be tweaked and tortured for months to come!)

Over half a million characters and counting

Click the image above and you’ll see the results of a word count on the plugin directory, there’s plenty lines, words and characters that have gone into this so far, I hope it doesn’t have to go to 1 MILLION characters before it’s done.

Shelving an external project

Some of you know that previous to December, I was working every single hour before work on an external project in a ‘work for free but get a cut of the profits’ kind of deal. Well, it evolved into something that I would have never have got involved in if I had known beforehand how much time and effort it would take just to even get it to the ready to test stage.

Rather than lose more sleep over the fact that I am going to lose the opportunity to work on CommentLuv and bring out a new version before someone else does, I have decided to shelve the project for now and concentrate on my first love. That’s CommentLuv!! hurray! There’ll be a series of video blog posts and question and answer sessions coming soon about the new CommentLuv, I’d love it if you got involved and gave me your feedback.

New contest

The good news for you is that there’s an awesome new contest for you to enter! yup, following on the massive success of the last contest, we’re doing another one. I mentioned a little about it in the last newsletter and I’m mentioning it a little bit now, it’s already got over a thousand dollars in prize money (the cash kind) and a few thousand in digital prizes.

Thanks goes to Brian our regular godaddy coupon guy who also runs Coupon Swapper for being the latest top level sponsor!

Stay tuned next week where I’ll be giving you a lot more information about it and how you can enter.

Back to blogging (soon)

It’s been a real boon to have so many awesome guest posts to have kept the blog alive while I was away on the project, thanks to all those who contributed! We have over 100 guest bloggers here now, most have written just one post but there are a few repeat posters who have really stood out.

I’m talking about Mitz Pantic from WordPress Website Builder who has had some of the busiest posts out of all the guest bloggers. I’m also talking about Reiter331 who has a knack for writing things that generate a lot of comments like he does on his site Reiter Thinks and not forgetting Satrap who writes articles that can help you make money online.

Every week, I add the top performing guest post to the CommentLuv facebook page so it gets even more exposure and there’s still plenty of room for more guest posts! Be sure to come by and apply to be a guest blogger by submitting a support ticket in the dashboard and I’ll give you the nod when you’re approved. Guest posters get an excerpt of their article included in the newsletter and the author box uses dofollow links with your registered site details used as the anchor text.

When my shop order system project has finished (or at least, ready to be used) then I’ll be full on back to blogging, developing for CommentLuv (oooh I have some big news about that, let me tell you!) and organising the contest.

New adsense

There are a few new adsense blocks around the site thanks to a wonderfully useful call from a pretty (well, she sounded pretty) girl called Sophie from Google who went over some things that she thinks can make a difference to the adsense earnings here. If you’re interested, I can add a few posts about what I did and how, there’s some pretty cool things you can do and most of them are pretty easy to add to your own site by adding a few lines of code to your functions.php file. Let me know in the comments if you’re interested in seeing posts about that.

New advertisers

Welcome to Directory Journal who has sponsored the site this month with a big fat banner designed by the inhouse design team especially for displaying on Comluv. Hasan runs Directory Journal which is a directory site with a difference, register your site and get it reviewed by experts within 48 hours (on some packages). There are a number of options that can help get your site noticed like getting 5 deep links or a manual human review. His prices are very reasonable and if you have ever seen the amount of directory sites that turn up in search results when you’re searching for something you need then you’ll know how useful they can be for businesses with new sites. Click to register your site.

Thanks to you and the other advertisers, the site can stay up for another month! hehe, things have gotten a bit trim with regards to ad income over the past few months due to me not having time to source new companies to take advantage of the ads.

To get the ball rolling with the text link ads, I’ve got a nice coupon for you. This one will roll back the prices to last years level and allow you to buy a PR6 text link ad for 40% off! and unlike the Christmas offer, you can subscribe with this one and it’ll stay at that price for as long as the subscription remains active! Get the 90 day subscription and you could save over 80 dollars on the regular price!

This offer only runs until next Tuesday 8th Feb 2011 and there are only a few available spots so be quick! they ran out within a day last time I made a crazy offer like this!

Use comluv-ad-offer as the coupon code on the checkout page for the text link ads to take advantage. See the text link page to purchase text link ads

If you need a custom advertising solution, feel free to contact me!

More about the contest

Come back often to check on the status of the contest and if you’re interested in becoming a sponsor then please let me know! there are 3 levels to the cash sponsorship 300,200 and 100 . There are also opportunities for cash + products so if you have some useful blogger tools/courses/books/videos/memberships that you would like to get some extra exposure for then shoot me an email!