Working Under the Hood
The last couple of days I’ve been working under the hood on the blog. Here’s what I’ve deployed – feel free to test and let me know if there are issues:
- Gravatars. These are little pictures beside each comment. If you have one set up – click here to do so – it will display yours. Otherwise it displays the little quilt-like image.
- Subscribe to Comments. Shawn requested this one a long time ago and I’d managed to turn it off. It’s back – but you need to scroll to the bottom of the page to select it – I can’t figure out how to change that.
- Updated Flickr integration. My Flickr photostream was so old it was incompatible with the rest of my site. This one gives me the ability to display whole photo galleries – I’m looking forward to playing with it.
- Edit comments. This is the one I’m most excited about! This allows you, the commenter, to edit your own comments for the first 30 minutes following initial comment creation. Those typos you only see after you hit “upload”? You can fix them!
The three things I was not able to get working were a sidebar poll widget, separation of trackbacks and comments in post footers, and a randomized header image, a la Random Michelle. I have to admit that the latter is because I ran out of time and didn’t try.
October 2nd, 2008
OH! I love the edit your own comment thingy. I need to find that for typepad.
October 2nd, 2008
It’s currently throwing an error after editing saying “You are not allowed to edit the comment, the time has expired etc.” – but it makes the edit anyway. I am combing through the code trying to find the problem. Sigh.
But it is cool – probably twice a week folks comment that they’re frustrated they’ve posted a typo.
October 2nd, 2008
Jeri,
Michael wrote the php script for me. If you like, I can send it to you. All you should need to do is add your own image names into it. (I modified his original file to display different sized images on my splash page, so it’s pretty straight forward.
Just e-mail me.
October 2nd, 2008
I like the changes. The debates are over. I’m now watching cartoons.
Why yes, I’m loopy from lack of sleep.
October 3rd, 2008
I’m just posting this to see what my current Gravatar is.
Joking. Love the Flickr integration, Jeri. I need to get on with the program and move my galleries there one day.
[edit] Bo-o-o-ring Gravatar! I need to update it to my likeness. But, hey, here is an “edit comments” usage
October 3rd, 2008
Changed Gravatar! Just thought I should tell you.
[edit] Interestingly, it did not pick up for this new comment…
October 3rd, 2008
They both picked up on my view – as did both edits. Did you get the error message after your edit?
October 3rd, 2008
Yes, I got the edit error – what’s more, it replaces the entire comment entry form; you have to click on the post title again to get it back.
Now I see the changed avatar – cool!
October 4th, 2008
Cool. That is funny that the notification checkbox goes to the bottom.
But hey, now I can check it. Thanks!
October 4th, 2008
Try moving the notification textbox into the previous paragraph tags–stripping off it’s own tags–and see if that works.
October 4th, 2008
Thanks, Ilya, I need to find some time to troubleshoot that. From an IT perspective, I’d call this a medium priority defect – it throws an annoying error message, but the application still functions with a workaround business process.
Shawn and Michelle, I also need to take a look at the notification CSS – my first quick survey didn’t tell me why it was aligning so strangely.
October 6th, 2008
Well those are some nifty improvements. I would have no idea.
-bm