The Engineered Boulderer

As some of you may have noticed my blog has been decidedly offline for a week or so. Today I was sitting with the server and finally found the culprit. The problem is the with the Textile 2 (improved) plugin that I use (and usually love) on both my own site, as well as Susan’s and my mom’s.

I am still missing the plugin upgrade on my mom’s site (I can’t remember the admin password), but once I do it they should all work again.

Sorry for the downtime, but I have a few articles in the pipeline that should tidy you over within the weekend. I will also run with the default theme for wordpress until I make a new theme (which could take a while). I discovered how many plugins I was using in my theme and thought it was time to clean out.

One time on flickr I was looking at the “Photos you’ve commented on” feature, and thought, wouldn’t it be great if we had that on our blogs? Then we could follow the discussions we’re taken part in.

If you are not familiar with this feature, it’s a list of a number of photos you’ve commented on with newer responses shown too. I took a little screenshot for clarification purposes.

For each photo the title is shown – for example Worst ad ever! – along with the total number of comments and the number of comments since your latest. Unless you’re over the threshold the first comment shown is your own, followed by the newer comments.

My idea was to include it in the sidebar, but including the comment text as flickr does would be a little to extreme. I simply include the name of the author of the newer comments.

I’ve included a limit, if there are more new comments than this limit, only the newest within the limit are shown (with an elipsis in front). By default the limit is 6 comments. The limit on the number of posts to show comments from is 5 by default. These are the same default limits as Brian Meidell’s Latest Comments plugin. In general the resulting html has taken a page from Brian’s plugin. This plugin also incooperates the comment temperature feature as seen in Brian’s Latest Comments. The implementation of that feature is courtesy of Brian.

Plugin will be available shortly, just have to clean up a bit and document it.

*Update:* There is a bug in the plugin where the listing of the comments is borked. I thought I had the SQL figured out, but I guess I’ll have to revisit it. I’ve taken the link down until I’ve fixed it.

Update: Error has been fixed, get it here: Your Comments and place the extracted php file in the plugins folder of your wordpress blog.

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Comments have been closed as the plugin has not been updated almost forever. I would refer people to the Extended Live Archive which is the Super Archives with extra features.

As I mentioned earlier I had problems with javascripts interfering with each other while loading. While I sorted out my problems with regards to the javascript, the reason why I was playing around with javascripts has already been leaked, and by none other than Michael Heilemann of Binary Bonsai. Since this is inspired by his ideas I guess it’s only fair.

Introduction overwith, I hereby give you: The Engineered Boulderer’s Super Archives Plugin to WordPress

For a demonstration, head over to Michael’s archives page, I am going to put it on my archives page, but it requires a minor redesign before I do.

IMPORTANT The javascript functions in my script have been tested, however, if there are other function set to run when the body loads, and they have problems then the super archive Will Not Run. The process of debugging javascripts is arduous work as they simply fail silently, because of this I do not have time to perform technical support on other people’s javascripts. That said, if Michael could get Super Archives to run on the B with the combination of javascripts he uses, then you can too.

I have included some documentation below, and in the plugin package.

Changelog

Version 1.6.2: Fixed a bug where draft posts in a month would make it show up in the list of months, thanks for the heads up Matthew. Requires a rebuild of the cache (edit a post or post a comment to rebuild).

Version 1.6.1: Fixed a regression which would prevent the php script from reading the settings and cache.

Introduced a more robust Javascript method of attaching events to the loading of the window.

Version 1.6: Fetches the character set from the blog to show international characters correctly.

New functionality for truncating post titles, see documentation below or with the plugin.

Version 1.5.2: Added a missing " in the description. Check the result from each use of document.getElementById() so as to not call null objects.

Version 1.5.1: Put a more stringent check on the FAT object for the Fade Anything Technique.

Version 1.5: Fixed bug where moderated comments were counted. Also, made sure cache was updated for new comments, and post deletions, and pingbacks, etc.

Updated cache structure so the cache can update (for example due to a new comment) while people are browsing the archives without requiring a reload (the plugin should automatically update your cache if you are using an old version).

Included new functionality, see the documentation included below or with the plugin.

Version 1.2: Implements support for Internet Explorer. Many thanks to Chris Boulton for his solution which worked wonders.

Version 1.1: Fixed a bug in the javascript (simple typo, oops).

System Requirements

• Wordpress 1.5 or later
• PHP 4.3.0 or later

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Inspired by Chris’ discovery of odd behavior in the wp-word-count plugin I set out to create a version which would not be cheated by occurrences of the word “img” in an entry. I am a coder and web-developer myself and could see myself writing snippets of HTML in my posts.

The solution I found was to run the relevant filters on the content, after I get it back from the database. Using the function apply_filters I was left with a chunk of real HTML. I could strip the tags of this HTML to count the words, and search the HTML for occurences of the <img ... /> tag by searching for the string “<img”.

So there you have it: The Engineered Boulderer’s Word Count Plugin.

Changelog

Version 1.1: Does not count wordpress included smilies as images. Added an argument to allow the plugin to count smilies as images.

Version 1.2: Corrected a bug in the implementation of version 1.1

Documentation

The template function the plugin provides is teb_word_count(display) which accepts two arguments.

display
(boolean) sets whether the function should display the number of words and images, or if it should return them.

• true (default)
• false

count_smilies
(boolean) set whether smilies should be counted as images. If false, the plugin will simply disregard smilies (neither count them as text, nor images).

• true
• false (default)

Disclaimer: This plugin has been tested to work on my test blog and here, but it could break in real life. If you see any problems with my implementation be sure to let me know.