Author comment highlighting

Posted on October 30, 2004 
Filed Under Uncategorized

I first noticed this when Dave Shea did it on “MezzoBlue.”:http://www.mezzoblue.com He coded his template so his comments appeared different than comments from other people. He took it a step further where he also color-coded comments from CSS/Web Design “pundits” and folks who tried to post anonymously. It caused a bit of stir on his site. But hey… his house, his rules.

Since then, quite a few sites have started doing this and I tell you, it makes reading comments much easier if you can quickly scan and pick out the site owner’s replies and updates to his/her entry.

I’ve been meaning to modify my templates to do this. Not that I get all that many comments but I thought it would help if my comments popped out. I see that Erik Barzeski just “redesigned his site”:http://nslog.com/archives/2004/10/30/design_done.php (I like it a lot, Erik) and now he’s doing it, too. Seemed pretty easy to implement. Dan Cederholm of “SimpleBits”:http://www.simplebits.com “explains”:http://www.simplebits.com/notebook/2004/10/25/highlighting.html how he did it using the “Switch plugin for MovableType.”:http://mt-plugins.org/archives/entry/switch.php I used a plugin that I already had installed called “Compare.”:http://www.staggernation.com/mtplugins/#Compare

bq. <MTIfEqual a="[MTCommentAuthor]" b="Judi Sohn">
<div class="comments-judi">
…

Simple. In the comments on the SimpleBits site there’s a lot of talk about spoofing comments. I tried comparing on the email field as suggested, but I have my MT configured to require a valid email address so entering a password instead wasn’t going to do it. If someone tries to pretend to me, I’ll get an email asking me to approve a comment from me that I don’t recognize. I’d be happy if the volume of traffic causes this to be a problem. For now, I think I can handle deleting stray comments manually.

By the way, MovableType 3.12 *is* much, much faster at rebuilds as promised. That’s part of the reason why I dreaded making any changes to my individual templates before. It would take *forever* for the site to rebuild. I still make changes in stages…test on one entry, then find another typical entry and save just that, and only after I’m sure the basic functionality is working do I rebuild the whole thing. Took less than 2 minutes to rebuild all 800 or so entries. The same rebuild would have taken at least 10 minutes, if not longer, under MT 2.x.

Comments

5 Responses to “Author comment highlighting”

  1. Judi Sohn on October 30th, 2004 8:11 pm

    See, this comment is from me!

  2. Karen on October 31st, 2004 7:16 am

    Thanks Judi, that is a great idea. And the “Compare’ plugin looks like it could be very useful too.

  3. Bear Bits on October 31st, 2004 7:42 am

    Highlighted comments

    I write this just before lunch, having already done the shopping and washed my car. Impressively organised for a Sunday…

  4. augenmerk agenturblog.de on November 12th, 2004 7:05 am

    Hervorheben der Kommentare des Bloggers

    Das optische Hervorheben von Kommentaren des Weblogautors kann (insbesondere auf Seiten mit etwas höherer Kommentardichte als dieser) sinnvoll sein. Natürlich kann man es auch als weiteres exponieren des eigenen Publizierens werten, richtig eingesetz…

  5. Roberlan Borges on July 20th, 2005 8:03 am

    I don´t know what i´m doing wrong, but this plugin didn´t work form me…
    The switch plugin (that simplebits uses) didn´t work form me too…
    Ok, i don´t have lots of comments, but “comment highlighting” is something i reallu wan to implement… =(
    Anyway, you have a very nice blog.
    =D

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