Tag: Comments

ClickComments on Feed

Db0

I’ve hacked the clickcomments plugin in order to make it display only in the feed (since my layout places the script on the single post’s sidebar).

However I’ve been trying to see it and it is failing for some reason. It just won’t display in my feedburner human-readable feed. I’m not certain if feedburner prevents scripts from running or if the script is malfunctioning but I can see the correct code in the source of the feedburner page.

Can any of me feed readers else see the clickcomments panel under the content? If so I’d appreciate to hear from you.

Just in case you want to do the same with your own blog, in order to make the plugin display the panel only in the feed, you need to edit the plugin in your wordpress installation and just after the function begins, insert:

if(is_feed()) {

and close the bracket just before the return $content; part

In case you want to place the panel in your sidebar (in a widget for example) I’ve found that the folllowing code works just fine

<div class="postreachclickcomments"><script src="http://www.postreach.com/ccengine/display_iframe?perlink=<?php the_permalink(); ?><!-- &url=<?php echo get_settings('home'); ?>" type="text/javascript">
// --></script></div>

And this doesn’t even need the plugin to be installed (but you do need a postreach account)
Hmmm…perhaps I should wrap this in a widget…

As an aside, I’ve figured out why clickcomments stops loading for me eventually. Initially I thought it stopped loading from my specific IP (which is why it kept working from anonymouse) but it’s not that. Apparentlythe script saves a cookie on your browser which stops loading the panel after you’ve voted 3 times.

Unfortunately this created some problems for me as a web designer as I could not actually check if the clickcomments panel is working or not with the changes I made on the layout (I could only see that the source existed). By clearing out all cookies under the Postreach name, the pannel appears again and you can vote once more.

The problem is that this is prone to abuse. Anyone who wished to get a higher rank could just clear his comments and vote his posts once more. Since postreach does not require an account before you vote and it does not check the IP (or so it seems) it is bound to be played by any unscrupulous blogger who dreams of more visitor hits and tries to achieve it through the showcase.

I just hope that Postreach has not implemented a simple security through obscurity method to avoid it and they actually have some checkpoints that I have not seen.

Comments and stuff

Db0

So I’ve put a two new tricks on my comment forms.

The first one is that you can now see a preview of what you are going to post. Just write your text and press the preview button and you should see it below. No more orthographical or html errors ;). This was done via the AJAX Comment Preview plugin. It needed me a little css tweaking in order to get it to display as I need it but fortunately I was able to find how to wrap the preview so that it fits with the normal comments.

The second one is the threaded comments option which is done through the plugin with the same name. Although at the moment you can have only one thread per comment, this might make it easier to follow the discussion in case it starts to derail (although I will admit that I don’t have so many commenters). The nifty addition to that is that the author of the comment will now receive an email notification when someone replies to his comment. The bad thing is that you can’t unsubscibe from that but given the low number of comments I get, I do not think that would be a big issue. You can still use the subscribe feature as well, but since this will inform you of every subsequent comment in the thread (even if you do not follow it anymore) most people don’t use it.

This plugin needed me even more time to get right as I needed to format the thread correctly and also test if more than one thread is viable. It is but currently the comment box is screwed on the second comment so I need to work on the css part of it. Until then I’ve enabled only a single thread replies.

One last update is that I expanded the comment field in order to give you a bigger view of what you are writing. I always found the one I had before a bit too small.

I think I’m now going to enable these on my two other blogs as well 😉