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.