Foldable Blogger comments

I have seemed to attract quite a few long in-depth comments, which is good. My blog template, however, isn't -- at least not for catering these. A better style would be (in javascript enabled browsers) to

• fold the comments,


• or better still, all comments already seen on prior visits (2005-12-22 addition),


• until clicking the "comments" link, or an arrow icon next to it.


• This brings up -- in the event of a single comment: the comment, properly unfolded.


• In the event of many comments: a list of all commentee names, the dates and times they were written, and why not how many paragraphs the comment body holds (split innerHTML on /(<br>){2,}/i, and the length length property will hold the number of paragraphs).


• Add little fold/unfold arrows, just like the backlinks,


• and a fold/unfold all arrow for the Comments header.

Tags:

• Blogger
• template
• comments

Blogger publish ping TODO

Bugs

• Injection of the Tags: field on the edit post page fails when either of Title and Link fields has been turned off.


• When the Published! page for some reason fails to publish, the URL linkifier renders some sort of error.


• The Published! page always adds the Del.icio.us and Post links, even when republishing the entire archive, in which case it just links the last post. Unintuitive.

Short term

• Ping FeedBurner (to avoid up to half an hour's update latency).


• Research which sites FeedBurner can ping for you? It doesn't seem to be listed in plain: might be worth at least asking politely.


• Quick Online Tips mentions a few other ping aggregator services worth picking up on, among others King Ping, Blog Blip and Pings.ws. There probably are a few more still mentioned in the visitor comments to the post.

Longer term

• Implement a proper script-local version of the XML-RPC Ping protocol and do fine-grained custom pinging.


• Perhaps even pick up on the semantics of the preferences set for any already configured ping sites (to only ping every mentioned site once, without using any of the middleman ping aggregator services).


• Add a ping preferences dialogue, perhaps similar to that of Movable Type, as pictured. If above is done, perhaps sport some comments ("tagged for Pingoat and Ping-O-Matic") too for good measure.

Tags:

• Greasemonkey
• FeedBurner
• tools
• ping
• xmlrpc

FeedBurner traffic history Greasemonkey visualizer

For pages that link to Feedburner for subscriptions (and/or shows a subscription count c/o Feedburner), it would be lots of fun to have a Greasemonkey script that graphs the blog traffic in a little canvas widget somewhere on the page (bottom right corner?) for blogs with the FeedBurner Awareness API turned on.

Details to be decided, but I think a mix of graphing the past week with some precision, offering more rough "past month" details, some less still precision for the past year, and perhaps something to give a rough idea of for how long the blog has been online and tracked by FeedBurner at all. Here is a peek into Micropersuasion's traffic logs; I believe it started tracking via FeedBurmer on July 9, 2004, judging by the statistics.

Maybe a good visualization would even sport some time navigation -- that way, it would probably be good enough just picking a month at a time and a day per month a year back from the focused month range (and perhaps one date per month forward too?). Add a bit of caching to that, to be nice to FeedBurner, and we have a quality hack.

Tags:

• Greasemonkey
• FeedBurner