Goodbye enetation!

Friday, 2006-09-08; 05:16:00


.mac comments have been activated for Technological Supernova!

Goodbye enetation! Don't let the door hit you on the way out!

Check it out: .mac comments have been enabled on this weblog. (Note that, for now, only the most recent two entries have comments enabled.)

My friend and I managed to hack up the JavaScript that powered the main weblog page, so that I could get comment counters on the main page. In practically the only time where the .mac commenting system gave me a break, it was actually quite simple to allow .mac comments to work from the homepage.mac.com subdomain. One line in the comments.js entry needed to be changed (so the URL for comments data was retrieved from web.mac.com instead), and I just needed to make a dummy HTML page at the corresponding web.mac.com location.

The comments are completely unstyled at this point, and features like smilies, HTML in the comments, and live preview are gone for now, but it was high time that I moved away from enetation. In fact, in the last week, moderation of the comments became completely broken: I could login to their servers, but when I went to the enetation comment pages to try and edit/delete entries, it claimed that I still needed to login! Argh.

Two cool things about .mac comments: first, .mac comments can appear in-line in the entry page (because JavaScript cross-domain security restrictions don't apply, since it's all on the mac.com domain). Second, when you add a comment, the comments dynamically update right in the page, without the whole page refreshing. Quite nifty.

Check it out, tell me what you think. :)

(As for the app that activates comments, I'm going to add support for homepage.mac.com URLs -- it'll allow you to quickly create dummy files so that the .mac comments system will work. Also, these dummy files won't just be any dummy files: they'll dynamically load the real weblog entry page, so even if you accidentally visit the web.mac.com URL for the page, it'll automatically redirect you to the homepage.mac.com URL. Try it -- visit the permalink for this entry, and then change the URL from homepage.mac.com to web.mac.com.)


Technological Supernova   Tips   Older   Newer   Post a Comment