1. Going Down

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    Often on weekends a thought pops into my head — 'I should do a personal post on all that's happening!'. I begin to mentally catalogue what the post will contain so I'm ready. By the time Monday comes and I sit to write… nothing comes. Aint that the way of it? I guess a breif update on the state of affairs in Chad is in order. Elections went well and rebel activity seems to be back to normal. Of course that's all unpredictable, but everything's looking fine as of now. I burned a backup of all our data onto DVD the other day, which took forever, but is well worth it to have all our data on a nice small disk :) I've done almost no school today. All I have left is my English final and Math stuff. Yup, kinda cool.

    We watched The Sound of Music on Saturday — really funny! J'adore ces anciens films! ;) We also got this new season pack from Uncle Larry… 24. It's 24 1-hour episodes that each cover 1 hour of time over a whole day. Really well done, and really addicting. They always leave you hanging!

    Man it's hot here! Blah! The time to Chels' return is approaching, but it still a fair ways off. Of course we'll get but a breif time to talk and then both will be off to Canada and readjustment scedules. Deputation for her (bleagh!) and random whoknowswhat for me. mmm. *thinks* I should say something else, but my mind has gone blank… maybe I'll go write a chapter in my book, hehe, I got some inpiration the other day so it should be easier ;)
    'til I next do post or chat or whatever avec thou

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    Creative Commons Licence © 2006-2008 Stephen Paul Weber. Some Rights Reserved.
    Stephen Weber at 2006-05-08 04:00 | 18 Comments / Trackbacks

  2. Comment Photos and Highlighting

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    PurpleMoggy has created a set of instructions for using this on Blogger BETA. I have updated my hack to support his new features and fix the bugs he found. There is also now a new 'no image' image.

    Awhile back I wrote a post detailing my hack for adding profile photos to comments. Unfortunately that post was rather technical in its explanation. This post attempts to deal with adding the hack to your blog in a more user-friendly fashion and also with using the hack to highlight blog-contributor comments.

    Step 1 - The first thing you need to do is find the comment section in your blog template. Edit your template and scroll down until you find the <BlogItemComments> tag. The code inside should look something like this:

    <div class="comment-poster" id="c<$BlogCommentNumber$>">
    <a name="c<$BlogCommentNumber$>"></a>
    <$BlogCommentAuthor$> said…
    </div>

    <div class="comment-body">
    <div class="innerCmntBody"><$BlogCommentBody$></div>
    </div>

    <div class="comment-timestamp">
    <a href="#c<$BlogCommentNumber$>" title="comment permalink">4/26/2006 07:49:51 PM</a>
    </div>

    Step 2 - If you plan to use comment highlighting (so that the comments made by blog authors look different from those of users) this must be wrapped in another tag so that all of the code for each comment is in one tag. Like so:

    <div class="commentelem">

    <div class="comment-poster" id="c<$BlogCommentNumber$>">
    <a name="c<$BlogCommentNumber$>"></a>
    <$BlogCommentAuthor$> said…
    </div>

    <div class="comment-body">
    <div class="innerCmntBody"><$BlogCommentBody$></div>
    </div>

    <div class="comment-timestamp">
    <a href="#c<$BlogCommentNumber$>" title="comment permalink">4/26/2006 07:49:51 PM</a>
    </div>

    </div>

    Some blog templates will already have a tag around their comments, as will those using the 'standard' comment markup. If you have one of those templates just write down the class of the wrapping tag or add one (the underlined section above).

    Step 3 - Next we need the class of the element where we can look for the link to the author. In the example code above this would be comment-poster. When in doubt use the class of the overall wrapping tag. Once you have it, write it down. Count the number of <a> tags there are before the <$BlogCommentAuthor$> tag and write this number down (in the above example it is 1).

    Step 4 - The only thing left to do in this part of the code is to insert the element where the profile photo will go. Add this code right before the <$BlogCommentBody$> tag: <div class="commentphoto"></div>

    Step 5 - Now go to the <head> section of your blog and add the following code:

    <script type="text/javascript" src="http://jscripts.ning.com/get.php?xn_auth=no&amp;id=830605"></script>
    <script type="text/javascript">
    //<![CDATA[
    function thisblog_showCommentPhotos() {showCommentPhotos('commentphoto','class of author wrapper',# of a tags,'main wrapper class','<$BlogURL$>','highlighted text colour','highlighted text background';}
    addLoadEvent(thisblog_showCommentPhotos);});
    //]]>
    </script>

    Where class of author wrapper is the class you wrote down in step 3, the # of a tags is the number you wrote down in step 3, and the main wrapper class is the class you wrote down in step 2. If you are not going to use comment highlighting the last for parameters can be left off (from main wrapper class to highlighted tex background) otherwise you have to fill in the color you with the text and background of highlighted comments to be in their appropriate spots above.

    Step 6 - Save and Republish!

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    Creative Commons Licence © 2006-2008 Stephen Paul Weber. Some Rights Reserved.
    Stephen Weber at 2006-05-08 02:14 | 18 Comments / Trackbacks
Stephen Paul Weber