Sunday 13 July 2008

Comments v5

Like being overcharged for an O'Brien's sandwich (just don't ask for chicken and bacon together as the doubled the price of the sarnie yesterday), there's some things I just can't forget. So I did some more searching for solutions to the comments problems. This time I wanted to increase the number of comments summarised in the sidebar from 5 to 10. Blogger doesn't allow this. The new Blogger-in-Draft feeds have added tabs or sliders. Then I found David Havelin's work with Yahoo!Pipes. Bish, bash, bosh, I ended up with an RSS feed that showed a summary of the last 10 comments posted on my blog.

comments_pipe

Annoyingly, when adding in the feed to the Blogger widget, it still has a max of 5 posts, overwriting the 10 set in the Pipes feed. I couldn't get rid of the brackets around the author's name. Why do computers make life sooo difficult for people? Oh, yes, life is the important stuff that doesn't involve computers.

3 comments:

paul martin said...

I have a blogger account and i looked at the dashboard to see where you are having such fun. Maybe cos there are no comments there seemed to be nothing much to play with. When you have reached a conclusion maybe a prescient pic (hopefully as pretty as today's) could be incorporated to help the blogger comment window virgins. (Please don't feeel you have to rush and find my blog and .. )

AktoMan said...

Settings >> Site Feed >> Advanced
Check that the three Feed options are set to Full.

Save settings.

Layout >> Page Elements >> Add a Page Element

Now, I was sure there was one called "Comments", but I don't see it there, maybe cos I've used it.

If you use "Feed" instead, your comments feed will be your versions of:
http://aktoman.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default?alt=rss

AktoMan said...

1458 - Comments v2 (atom) has updated with the 1425 comment.

1528 - Comment v3 (rss) updated to 1425 comment.

I followed up some stats and read in the Blogger API docs that "The Blogger Data API uses only standard Atom elements; for more information, see the Atom 1.0 syndication format specification and the Atom Publishing Protocol."
source

I also added a "no cache" instruction to the blog's HTML template in case the feed's 'pull' system was caught up with the user's cache. (as mentioned on 9x6's blog)

I'll see what happens. The original comment widget was set up using the default Atom feed. The only difference is that it is being pulled through Yahoo!'s 'pipe' and back to the blog on an RSS feed.