Commentblogger bookmarklet
Posted: December 10th, 2003 | 7 Comments »The problem: You post comments to other people’s blog entries, as part of ongoing conversations. But you soon forget and abandon those you’ve commented on, so the conversation doesn’t go very far. And there was that really witty thing you wrote on someone else’s blog the other day which would go well on your own site… where was it again? Oh, such tsoris!
I was intrigued by thoughts from Lisa Williams and Paulo Valdemarin about maintaining a blog of one’s own comments to other blogs. The question is, how do you actually enable that? Paulo suggests some big architecture involving aggregation. I don’t like that idea ‘cos it sounds too complicated and requires that everyone changes everything. I’d rather do a quick hack.
Here it is: mine’s here. (Remember to set the default status to “Publish” in the Blog Config – I keep forgetting that) Alternatively, you could just use your existing blog, with perhaps a new category for remote comments. You have to select that blog to post to in the MT Entry window, plus give the entry a title that reflects the content of the comment. But that’s it.
This is still the first version, and it still needs lots more work…
- It only works with MovableType so far (because that’s all I have to test with), but there’s no reason it can’t be ported to other blogware in one way or another. (If someone could help me with Radio and Blogger in particular – I just need details of any bookmarklets those systems already have for New Entry Posting, and what variables the server-side bit wants from a form)
- If the window with the remote blog entry’s comment form in it doesn’t have the toolbars that make the bookmarklet accessible, you’re currently a bit screwed. (But just a bit. Use a context menu to get the URL of that page and open it in a proper window.)
- Oh, and it currently assumes that the first form it finds on the page is the comment form, but that should be quite fixable (perhaps by looking for the first form with a textarea in it)
… which you’re all welcome to help me with, if you find it useful!
I’d say the most general solution would be to use the Blogger API or MetaWeblog API to post to the user’s blog, that way a single implementation could work for all systems. It might even be possible to add support for comments to the MetaWeblog API. I know the Atom people feel this is their province, but I like to design APIs too. ;->
But what about finding out if someone replies to your comment?
I use Firebird to browse, and you can set a schedule for bookmarks, to let you know if the site’s changed since you were last there. I believe IE has something similar. When I comment on a site, I just bookmark that page into a “watched pages” folder and set a schedule.
I think IE has something similar (or used to).
Wow, thanks! This is a valuable contribution. I blogged it over here.
I just attempted your comment bookmarklet. It called up the MT edit screen OK, but it contained the following:
Petrified Truth
IncludeBlogs: 1
search:
: Search
It did not contain the comment text.
Any suggestions what the cause is?
To Cranial,
Hi, by the time you see this you may have already figured. I had same thing to start with.
Commentblogger only works from the individual entry menu. If you are making comments from popup window, Commentblogger will only show few infos.
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