Halo, wurld

While putting this nifty site together, I figured I would need to do two important things:

1. Reconfigure the comments so people could interact with it.
2. Not delete it before anybody saw it.

Well, as far as the first one goes, Mission Accomplished! Now let's see how long number 2 lasts. But the reason for this post is because of the nifty comment system I put in (and how simple it was to hack together).

Because, you know, comments are my life-blood. Yeah, icky, I know.

First of all, I had to get the threading going. You can see that threading in the comments below. That is part of the power of Movable Type 4.2.something…and all it took was figuring out how to get the thing to nest correctly.

What I was really pleased about MTOS 4.2.something was that you could create something like Brian's Latest Comments without using a single plugin. To get it to work, all you need to do is replace the Recent Comments Widget code with this:

<mt:If tag="BlogCommentCount">
<div class="widget-recent-comments widget">
<h3 class="widget-header">Recent Comments</h3>
<ul class="recent-comments-list"><mt:Entries recently_commented_on="10" >
<div class="widget-content">

<li><a href="<$mt:EntryPermalink$>"rel="bookmark"><$mt:EntryTitle$></a>
<mt:Comments lastn="7" sort_order="descend">
<mt:CommentsHeader>
(<$MTEntryCommentCount singular="1" plural="#" none=""$>):</li>
<li>
<small class="recent-comments-list">
</mt:CommentsHeader>
<mt:if name="__last__">
<a href="<$mt:CommentLink$>"><$mt:CommentAuthor$></a>
<mt:if tag="MTEntryCommentCount" gt="5">
[<mt:CommentEntry><a href="<$mt:EntryPermalink$>">…</a>]</mt:CommentEntry>
</mt:if>
<mt:else>
<a href="<$mt:CommentLink$>"><$mt:CommentAuthor$></a>,
</mt:if>
<mt:CommentsFooter>
</small>
</mt:CommentsFooter>
</mt:Comments>
</li>
</mt:Entries>
</ul>
</mt:If>


I swear I have no intention of ever doing any of that Digg-bait-y kind of how-to posts, but I wanted to show off how easy it was to get this to work with just the built-in Movable Type tags. And the first four comments here are just to show off the way things thread, I am not that desperate for comments.

Probably.