If you’d like to comment on the change I’ve made to the Recent Comments section of the side bar, this is where you’d do that.
I got a couple of emails over the last year asking for a return to showing which posts had recent comments rather than a list of recent comments. The argument goes that if I get 20 comments on one post, no other posts are shown. I can respect that reasoning.
I changed the plug-in that I use to display recent comments when I changed the theme of the site. It doesn’t have that same option, but it does have a ‘group comments by post’ option. So I chose that option and chose to show a max of 1 comment per post. So now you get to see the post title, whomever posted the last comment, and the date posted. Should I change that to time? Or both date and time?
Also I increase the number of recent comments to show from 20 to 30. I’m not sure how this works. If the 30 most recent comments are on one post, would it only show that one? As I write this, it’s showing 18 posts. I don’t know how it comes up with that.
Personally, I think it’s hard to read. My formatting options are somewhat limited though.
I subscribe to both the articles and the comments, so I don’t have to deal with the way the comments are listed.
I like the new presentation – but I was one of the guys requesting a change. (perhaps I should adopt RSS like Jon?)
Hi Dick
>Personally, I think it’s hard to read
I agree with you
The best way to keep track of a comment thread (in my opinion) is with co.mments.com. You create an account, then subsribe to your co.mments feed in your rss reader. Any time there’s a comment thread I’m interested in, I click the bookmarklet and I’m good to go. I like co.mment over cocomment because the rss feed will contain chunks of comments. ie.- if there are 20 comments since the last time it checked, one feed will have 20 comments. cocomment will send 20 individual feeds.
Anyway, I hope this helps some of you comment trackers out there.
-Jeremy
Dick – when we click on a comment in the recent comments list it used to take us to that comment, but now it takes us to the top of the thread. A small point, but I preferred it the old way.
Doug – If you click on the post title, you are taken to the top of the post. If you click o the person’s name, you are taken to their comment.
The only exception to this I have seen is when the post has images – I was taken to the comment and then the window scrolled when the images loaded…
Dick – I like the new layout, it works well for me as I don’t always have access to the feeds.
Dick, like the return, but find the layout a little crowded. Like being able to click straight to the new comment or begin of post depending on when I last looked, that’s cool.
Maybe last 10 posts commented rather than the current 15? Date definitely needs to stay I would say, time would be a nice to have, as long as it doesn’t crowd any more.
And just noticed an interesting item on here…
*click the post name, you go to the top of that post.
*click the name/date etc of the last commenter, you go to that comment.
*click the number of comments in brackets after the post name, you go nowhere at all, despite a hyperlink being assigned to it….
(e.g. I click the “(6)” after “Comments on Comments” when in the “22 hours” post, and I stay put in the “22 hours” post – I would expect to go to the beginning of the comments section of the “Comments on Comments” post?).
Seems the hyperlink assigned to that part matches the current URL. What’s that all about?
re RSS: That’s how I read everything anymore. I’ll bet 95% of my web time is spent at bloglines.com.
re crowded: I agree. Suggestions? I would like to show only the first ‘x’ characters of the post title because I think that would clean it up. That never works as well as I think it will. Also, I didn’t write the php for this, so I don’t really want to modify it. Can I limit the number of characters via a style?
re time: I would like that too. It uses the default date format rather than letting me specify one, otherwise I’d shorten the date to, say, 17-Oct and add the time.
re count: Fixed.
I’ve only recently begun to leave comments in “Count Everything But…” only to find they’re not displayed in full; my name links to my web site and not to a display of my full comment; the date and time stamp on my comments is a “top of comment” link; and some of my comments aren’t displayed at all.
In the absence of automatic full comment display, I would have expected the link on my name to lead to my complete comment and that all my comments are published otherwise the full sense and significance of my input is lost, making my contributions pointless.
Donald, if you enclose anything in “Greater-Than” and “Less-Than” symbols, the blog software thinks it is a HTML tag and does not print it.
Thanks, Charles. I made that discovery after leaving my first clutch of responses, and immediately re-submitted my comments using the appropriate HTML code.
But my repaired submissions haven’t appeared at all. Weird!