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Interview with Andy Bailey, CommentLuv founder

Posted on 25. Jan, 2010 by Mohale Muzi in The Interview

There are multitude of plug-ins on the market mainly created to benefit the blogsphere. However only a few are able to crack the code and be accepted by bloggers because of their usefulness. CommentLuv is one such plug-in which is making waves with bloggers as it helps generate traffic for bloggers commenting on other blogs. Today the founder Andy Bailey, takes us through the history of creating his hugely popular plug-in and what’s in store for the future…

What is Andy Bailey’s professional background and where is he based?

I live in Lancaster, UK with my partner and we run a Chinese takeaway and delivery shop with her brother. It’s a nice little business called The Fired Wok (http://firedwok.co.uk a comluv blog site). My professional background is a diverse and eclectic collection of jobs around the world ranging from barman to casino pit boss to now – guy behind the counter in a Chinese takeaway.

What inspired the creation of CommentLuv and when was it unleashed to the blogging community?

I made it when a new service launched that was supposed to get new bloggers traffic by displaying links on their site. Typically for a new service like this from a so called Guru, it only really benefited the big guys so I decided to write something that would put links to my own reader’s sites on mine.

I considered an auto blogroll thing but blogrolls were a bit ‘mehh’ to me because they required constant maintenance.  I’m always up for finding a way to make something easier or automatic. I’m motivated by laziness

That was around the time I was taking apart a php file to see how it parsed some text on another site, then I found the WordPress codex which had all the functions you could use in WordPress and from that I figured I could parse the feed of a user from the url they leave when they comment. It was also a good opportunity for me to learn PHP. I did most of my learning looking at other WordPress plugins and constant visits to php.net and just learned what I needed to get the job done, I figured I’d have plenty of time later to tidy up code when I go back and learn the basics, which I’ve still yet to do hehehe.

Within a week of scratching my head and getting sore eyes from the monitor (I sat there for 11 hours once without eating or going to the toilet while I tried to figure out how to step through an array of xml data, nearly made me faint (and poop my pants)) …I had a very simple version that would parse a WordPress blog feed after the comment got submitted and put that on my own site, someone asked for a copy and then another so I made it into a ‘proper’ plug-in and released it around February 2007.

It’s grown in complexity as I’ve got better at PHP , each new version adding more features and at the last big change, when I discovered a tutorial on jQuery, it grew into an AJAX powered plug-in.

The only recent changes are adding languages and making it compatible with the advancing WordPress versions. I’d like to rewrite the code and take advantage of the new add_comment_meta commands but the takeaway is taking away all my time! It takes a lot of work to keep the business running with so few staff but its fun and, it pays the bills. I try to work on commentluv stuff in spare hours or on my laptop while I wait for calls at the desk in the takeaway.

CommentLuv is a free plug-in, how do you monetize your effects?

I only made it to see if I could, I never had any plans for monetizing it.

Just recently I launched ComLuv.com which I wanted to do because some people I knew didn’t have WordPress and I wanted a way of giving them a blog and it was a chance to learn how WPMu works (most things I get into happen because I want to see if I can do it).

The site has a supporter option which has a few subscribers for $5 a month which gets a WP blog with commentluv installed, custom css ability and SEO tools. I hope to add more supporters to the site but it’s not a priority right now. There is also the new additional URLs feature added where a user can register a new URL to their account so it receives the 10 last posts for 3 credits a year.

I’m not expecting much from the premium features but maybe enough to pay for the dedicated managed server I rent to host the site and CommentLuv API. Making money with CommentLuv was never really my priority, it has always been a hobby for me, a way to learn new code and to bring joy into bloggers lives.

I’d really love to get CommentLuv 3.0 done, I’d put some great features in that if I had the time. I am considering making it a premium plug-in with the added feature of auto registering the blog it’s installed on. Other things like a widget to show recent luv given and stats to show you what links of yours are getting clicked. Complete control of the CSS is a priority on the new one if I get to it, that and other community building features like allowing 10 posts for registered members or reminders for blogs that commented on you but you haven’t commented on.

Maybe that would be worth paying for? If I could make a little money via the plug-in, it would the justify the time off work to do the coding and testing along with the other maintenance tasks that a 2000 blog WPMu install requires. I’d be over the moon if I could turn ComLuv into my full time job and my missus could stop getting RSI from using a wok for hours everyday but, I’m happy with how things are going so far.

Not having CommentLuv as my main bread winner and not needing it to make money straight away or I’ll starve means I can take my time with it and also I have the luxury of learning how to do something and then doing it myself which means I don’t have to pay for anyone else to do it and that keeps me fully aware of all the code and how it behaves.

Making money with it would be nice though! I’m sure with the amount of traffic coming in, the huge amount of blogs using it and all the luv it brings to blogging that there will be opportunities I’ll let them develop as they go, no need to hurry. Slowly, slowly, catchy monkey!

When I checked CommentLuv has been downloaded 127,176 times as I was preparing this interview, how does it feel (since a large number of plug-ins don’t make those figures)?

And that’s just from the official download site! I’m over the moon that so many people use the plug-in. It means there are thousands of bloggers who give back to their readers and build a community from their own blog without needing to go to multiple social network sites. In the last 6 months, CommentLuv was used as a plug-in on more than 170,000 unique blogs. Those kind of numbers make my head spin

Another number I’m proud of is the amount of results on Google for the term “commentluv”. When I first decided I would make it into a plug-in I did searches on loads of terms and finally settled on commentluv because it had the .com available and only had 37 references in Google and all were talking about giving out commentluv to readers. Now, there are more than 2,000,000 references to the same search. The geek in me is happy with that.

WordPress constantly upgrades, how does that impacts on your plug-in?

Even if it doesn’t need it, I want to update my code. Mainly because I see something new or I want it to do it even more exactly how I want but the WordPress update schedule isn’t too bad and luckily, CommentLuv does most of its magic via java script. The 2.9 version is going to be interesting though, it’s working ok on the latest trunk but I want to take advantage of the new comment meta table which would allow me to take away the need to hard code the link in the comment and also allow me to identify each link, no more “this is a feedburner link” messages.

How long did it take for CommentLuv to be accepted in the market after being launched?

It grew organically. Someone comments on a blog with CommentLuv on it and they tend to like it so they get it. That’s how it’s gone since it started as a “can I have a copy” simple plug-in. It started to get around 100 downloads a day in mid 2008 and peaked at 2700 in a day in August last year. It gets 300 or so downloads a day now which is pretty good.
Plug-in is defaulted to ‘nofollow’, why not offer an option for a ‘dofollow’ for bloggers who don’t mind a ‘dofollow’?

I didn’t want to code in dofollow because of the amount of scripts that scour the net for dofollow links and comment spams them. I had to spend a huge amount of time fighting against automated spam and the effect it has on the comluv server. Each spam comment submission made by the bots would cause my server to try and fetch the feed at the url submitted. Some bots were hitting WordPress sites with the plug-in installed more than 3000 times a minute, at one time there were 9,000,000 hits a month coming in to the API which was a ridiculous waste of bandwidth!!

I’ve added a lot of security checks to the API now so things have got much better (only 3,000,000 hits a month now!)

I may add the dofollow feature into the new plugin if it goes premium. Might be a nice way to encourage repeat comments if links were dofollow after a certain amount of comments made or for logged in users.

Besides CommentLuv, what’s in your portfolio?

I recently wrote twitterlink-comments which add a way for a blog owner to include a link to follow the comment author on Twitter. All previous ones required template edits so I made it for bloggers who can’t access the template like WPmu users or people with less coding skills.

I’ve made countless other scripts and plug-in. Most for my own use or for ComLuv.com. In the takeaway, I’ve written a system for recording deliveries and customer data so I can see exactly how far a customer is from the shop or what their average order size is as soon as the phone rings. I’m going to expand that into a POI system which runs completely from a USB key. That’s quite fun and working in the takeaway while I make it means I can make it exactly how it should be made. That’s another thing that is worked on when I get time (which is quite rare as you may have guessed)

What’s in store for CommentLuv in the near future?

Premium. 3.0. All the features people wanted and auto registration. (Just made that up!)
How long did it take to develop CommentLuv and why?

It’s constantly developing… because I haven’t learned all there is to know about php yet.

Article By Mohale Muzi
View all articles by Mohale Muzi

I’m Muzi Mohale, 35 years old better known as a travel blogger through Travelwires.com and South African based. AlreadyInspired.com has been created to meet my love for reading on blogger profiles. I enjoy reading on how other bloggers got introduced into the blogsphere and their strategies on making money through blogging.

Tags: Andy Bailey, API, Blog, Blog software, php, PHP programming language, Spam in blogs, Technology/Internet, WordPress