All Comments
I recently added something a little fun to the site: a way to view all comments by a particular person.
I've wanted to do this for awhile because I think it's a great way to get a sense of the vibe and history someone might have on a particular site (in this case, mine). Does someone tend to always be crabby or have they generally been pretty good?
On any of the comments on the site, just click on the "All Comments" link. When viewing all comments for a person, you can click on the article title to view the comment in its original location.
Along with this I also added the five most recent comments to the home page.
Fun stuff like this is easy with CakePHP. This took me all of a half hour to integrate. About 4 lines of code in the controller and about 10 lines of code in the view (90% of which is just HTML).
Conversation
And in case you wanted to try it out, feel free to view all of my comments. :)
Thats a good idea, besides the fact many users can have the same name :]
Miles: true. The comment look up is actually based on email address (which I've encoded so as not to publicize those email addresses). So, in actuality, you can actually see if people use variations of their own name over time (which some do).
I already told you in e-mail, but I don't mind publicly saying that this is a sweet idea and I fully intend to steal it. :)
I want to try this.
hahaha!
Awesome!
Nice! Just to see all of my comments, I'm commenting now.
Not that I don't like commenting otherwise, it's just that I -- like Jeff -- think this is pretty sweet.
Im only commenting to see all my comments :)
Geez - 32 comments. I am a comment whore. ha. This is a very nice feature...
Good call on using emails for key. Some other blog had a similar feature and I found myself on the list of "top commenters" because one of them also went by "Tony".
Cool idea. I'm mainly just commenting now, so I can see all my past comments!
What's interesting is that I've had this idea for awhile. I originally discussed it last year when showing some designs for YourTotalSite. It took me over a year to implement on my own site!
Nice idea - it would be cool to combine it with Jack Slocum's in-line commenting so that the aggregate view also showed what the archive comments are actually commenting on.
Hey, very well done Jon! I really like the idea of using the md5 of the email as the key. In the future though, you might want to consider changing it to a crc32 since int lookups are much faster in MySQL than a varchar. This will probably become more relevant as the comment count clears a 5-6 digit mark, but something to think in larger scale implementations.
This is one nice feature, cool idea!
I recently switched e-mailaddresses, so I probably won't have many comments
Matthew: The problem is that I'd have to have some way to identify which comment is being replied to and right now, I don't have that. But that would be interesting to see.
I think I've only commented a couple times...but I'm curious to see what they were...thus this comment.
Nice! This is a great idea, thanks for the inspiration.
Nice work Jon! It's these kind of changes and tweaks that make websites better, day by day.
happy new year, jonathan and all of you!!!
Gelukkig nieuwjaar!!! (Flemish-Belgium)
Awesome...All these cool custom blog CMSes are making me want to drop WordPress.
I just have to try it for myself ;)
Also happy new year to all the commenters and of course you, Jonathan.
and to johan: Jij ook een gelukkig 2007!
I, too, am totally going to steal this idea. Just like I stole the fixed comment box. I may steal your glasses too if you don't watch out! :)
This is cool, and it gives you a nice way of seeing when a person first discovered your site (unless they lurked for a while).
Jonathan Snook: Are you using a custom CMS? If not, what CMS are you using?
Bah, scratch that. I just read Elliot Swan's comment.
Steve: it's a custom CMS I built using CakePHP.
What a great and original idea. (Really just posting to see what it looks like... )
Cool idea, kinda useless aside from seeing who the most active people are, but fun nevertheless. (Like Jeff, I might steal this idea too...if I ever find the time to get a blog up.)
Jonathan, I see you pass the email as a hash in the URL (I assume this is to get around disallowed characters, I recently wrote something about this on my own blog).
Would you mind commenting if you used a particular hash, and why? Does cake offer convenient encode/decode native functions?
Derek: I'm actually just using an MD5 to help protect the anonymity of people's email address.
As far as I know, Cake doesn't offer convenient encode/decode functions but by the same token, I've been happy with those already built into PHP. I don't believe Cake has the same allowable character filter that Code Igniter has. Whether that is good or bad, remains to be seen. In .NET, I know their acceptable characters filter is absolutely annoying. ymmv.
Thanks for mentioning CakePHP. I took a look at it and now I'm hooked!!
Very sweet. I have been looking at CakePHP for sometime, and my partner loves it.
I've seen this sort of thing on WordPress blogs before with the wp-stats plugin or whatever it's called, but never thought of implementing it into my own blog. It's quite neat, and I hope you don't mind if I consider 'stealing' it? ;)
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