//beconfused

Yeah, I just upgraded to WordPress 2.1.3. It’s such a tiring work to again and again. I now really wish for some sort of a one click updater for WordPress that can just magically overwrite all the old files safely. And I’m not the only one requesting for it.

I kinda stayed with WordPress long enough to be familiar with the interface and all. There are still some things that I wish to see implemented:

* Akismet should really have the features in Worst Offenders. It’s much sensible to sort all the multilinks together and give an option to delete them altogether.
* I would appreciate that WordPress Sidebar Widgets is easier to code. Widgets are easy to code but they’re not really simple enough to code. The whole options thing get really messy after a while.
* Tags. I love what Blogger did to have the hint-as-you-type-tags feature. That’s really helpful.

By the way, K2 users should find Fresh Comments 1.2.1 working for sidebar modules, but you would require the latest nightly!

Oh yeah, and I found this Michael Jackson thingy. How did he do the 45 degrees lean forward in the Smooth Criminal stage live! Yes, he has a patent for that.

An update to Fresh Comments widget.

Fresh Comments 1.2.1 Changes

Just one tiny little change only. As pointed out by blogan, Fresh Comments 1.2 does not work with Nybble Lab’s Sidebar Modules (SBM) due to a mistake in the coding. The issue has been rectified.

What is Fresh Comments 1.2.1?

Fresh Comments 1.2.1 is a WordPress widget that displays the latest approved comments submitted by your visitors and also gives you - the owner - better control on how your recent comments are displayed. Go straight to download Fresh Comments.

How to install Fresh Comments?

(Click on the icon to configure Fresh Comments.)

Easy. Just download Fresh Comments 1.2.1 and extract it to your hard disk. Then upload freshcomments.php into your wp-content/plugins folder and then activate the plugin through your admin interface. Finally, check it out in your admin interface at Presentation -> Sidebar Widgets to add or remove Fresh Comments widget by dragging around.

How to configure Fresh Comments?

(Above is the configuration screen of Fresh Comments 1.1. See how Fresh Comments 1.0 look like.)

Here are the configurable options:

• Title - Give the widget a name to be displayed in your blog.
• Before - This is where you can insert HTML before all fresh comments are displayed. Recommended that you put <ul> here.
• After - This is where you can insert HTML after all fresh comments are displayed. Recommended that you put </ul> here.
• No. of comments - Number of comments to be displayed in descending chronological order for your fresh comments section. (Only takes a value of ‘1′ or more.)
• No. of preview words - Displays only the number of words you specify as a comment preview. (Only takes a value of ‘1′ or more.)
• Format - Allows you to specify how you want each line of fresh comment to be generated. You can click on ‘(reset)’ to go back to the default format. Read more about the formatting options below.

How to format Fresh Comments?

• %comment_author%
• %comment_author_url%
• %comment_content%
• %comment_preview% - Displays the first few words of the comments. The number of preview words is specified in the ‘No. of preview words’ option as mentioned above.
• %post_title%
• %comment_permalink% - This displays the URI of the comment in your post.
• %post_permalink% - This displays the URI of your post.

Most of the tags are pretty much self explanatory. To add a tag, just click or highlight within the formatting textbox and then click on the tag you wish to insert.

Below are some examples of formats you can use:

Format:

<li><a href="%comment_permalink%">%comment_author% in %post_title%</a>: %comment_preview%</li>

Format to HTML:

<li><a href="http://beconfused.com/blog/2006/03/22/busy-week/#comment-9812">Mr. Dew in busy//week</a>: Well, it's okay. I don't think I can do much</li>

Displayed in browser:

<li><a href="http://beconfused.com/blog/2006/03/22/busy-week/#comment-9812">Mr. Dew in busy//week</a>: Well, it's okay. I don't think I can do much</li>

Other examples of formats:

<li><a TARGET="_blank" href="%comment_author_url%">%comment_author%</a> in <a href="%comment_permalink%">%post_title%</a>: <a href="%comment_permalink%">%comment_preview% [...]</a></li>

<li><a href="%comment_author_url%">%comment_author%</a> says, <a href="%comment_permalink%">"%comment_preview%..."</a></li>

(Using Fresh Comment widget in your sidebar.)

Additional notes

If there are any things you spot that is not working, do give me a notice and I’ll fix it as soon as possible. I’m not an experience PHP coder so please forgive me if anything goes wrong.

Fresh Comments 1.2.1 is tested on WordPress 2.0.7 and WordPress 2.2.2 except to make it WordPress 2.1 compatible. The browsers tested are Windows Internet Explorer 7.0 and Mozilla Firefox 2.0.

Download it (2.97 KB in ZIP archive, 10.8 KB after extraction)

The source code for Fresh Comments 1.2.1 is distributed under GPL (General Public License), meaning that you can freely modify and distribute this source code.

Please do comment about my work.

Note that Fresh Comments 1.2.1 is out.

What is Fresh Comments 1.2?

Fresh Comments 1.2 is a WordPress widget that displays the latest approved comments submitted by your visitors and also gives you - the owner - better control on how your recent comments are displayed. Go straight to download Fresh Comments.

How to install Fresh Comments?

(Click on the icon to configure Fresh Comments.)

Easy. Just download Fresh Comments 1.2 and extract it to your hard disk. Then upload freshcomments.php into your wp-content/plugins folder and then activate the plugin through your admin interface. Finally, check it out in your admin interface at Presentation -> Sidebar Widgets to add or remove Fresh Comments widget by dragging around. (more…)

It’s raining a little too much for my liking. I was out yesterday and my shoes got a little damn. I like the after effects of rain (the cooling part as opposed to the flood part).

In the end, it is best to just stay home and do some work. I’ve been helping out with some web design thing and I just completed it. It was quite tiring for me editing Blogger layouts all of a sudden. I had a lot of things to learn and it’s just so confusing designing a theme around their widgets and stuff.

Blogger’s widgets are a great improvement, I love the new labels thingy that they provided too. Labels are basically like tags and Blogger done them right. You just have the type a few letters of the tag and you’ll see a Javascript hint at the bottom for a tag that you have already. My problem with WordPress is I accidentally created new categories like ‘Photo’ when I already have a category called ‘Photograph’ - that sort of thing. So Blogger’s labels are really neat as you won’t be making such silly mistakes. My only complaint about tags is that it lacks a method to manage your tags, you can’t really change your tag names all at a go. There are still quite a lot of limitations.

Widgets certainly gives the blog owner more power to change the theme and you can add your favorite lists and even customized HTML and Javascript easily. I love how they implemented it. Blogger has limited widgets currently. And designing for widgets is quite a horror initially. It isn’t very flexible for the theme designer.

Perhaps I’ll have an easier time in the next Blogger layout. But meanwhile, let me just take a break and rest for a couple of days. My gums are kinda bothering me. It felt uncomfortable with the stitches.

And for those Blogger users who has yet to upgrade to the new out-of-beta Blogger - it’s worth doing so for the widgets and labels. Theme design is harder, you’ll need decent knowledge of CSS if you want to manipulate the looks of widgets especially.

Note that Fresh Comments 1.2.1 is out.

What is Fresh Comments 1.2?

Fresh Comments 1.1 is a WordPress widget that displays the latest approved comments submitted by your visitors and also gives you - the owner - better control on how your recent comments are displayed. Go straight to download Fresh Comments.

How to install Fresh Comments?

(Click on the icon to configure Fresh Comments.)

Easy. Just download Fresh Comments 1.1 and extract it to your hard disk. Then upload freshcomments.php into your wp-content/plugins folder and then activate the plugin through your admin interface. Finally, check it out in your admin interface at Presentation -> Sidebar Widgets to add or remove Fresh Comments widget by dragging around.

How to configure Fresh Comments?

(Above is the configuration screen of Fresh Comments 1.1. See how Fresh Comments 1.0 look like.)

Here are the configurable options:

• Title - Give the widget a name to be displayed in your blog.
• No. of comments - Number of comments to be displayed in descending chronological order for your fresh comments section. (Only takes a value of ‘1′ or more.)
• No. of words - Displays only the number of words you specify as a comment preview. (Only takes a value of ‘1′ or more.)
• Date/Time format - This allows you to set the format where the date and time would replace %comment_datetime%. Fresh Comments 1.1 uses the PHP date formatting parameters.
• Show trackbacks - Checking this option enables trackbacks to be displayed in Fresh Comments.
• Show pingbacks - Checking this option enables pingbacks to be displayed in Fresh Comments.
• Before - This is where you can insert HTML before all fresh comments are displayed. Recommended that you put
  here.
  • After - This is where you can insert HTML after all fresh comments are displayed. Recommended that you put

  here.

• Format - Allows you to specify how you want each line of fresh comment to be generated. You can click on ‘(reset)’ to go back to the default format. Read more about the formatting options below.

How to format Fresh Comments?

• %comment_author%
• %comment_author_url%
• %comment_content%
• %comment_preview% - Displays the first few words of the comments. The number of preview words is specified in the ‘No. of preview words’ option as mentioned above.
• %post_title%
• %comment_permalink% - This displays the URI of the comment in your post.
• %comment_datetime% - This displays the date and time according to the format that you set in ‘Date/Time format’.
• %post_permalink% - This displays the URI of your post.

Most of the tags are pretty much self explanatory. To add a tag, just click or highlight within the formatting textbox and then click on the tag you wish to insert.

Below are some examples of formats you can use:

Format:

<li><a href="%comment_permalink%">%comment_author% in %post_title%</a>: %comment_preview%</li>

Format to HTML:

<li><a href="http://beconfused.com/blog/2006/03/22/busy-week/#comment-9812">Mr. Dew in busy//week</a>: Well, it's okay. I don't think I can do much</li>

Displayed in browser:

<li><a href="http://beconfused.com/blog/2006/03/22/busy-week/#comment-9812">Mr. Dew in busy//week</a>: Well, it's okay. I don't think I can do much</li>

Other examples of formats:

<li><a TARGET="_blank" href="%comment_author_url%">%comment_author%</a> in <a href="%comment_permalink%">%post_title%</a>: <a href="%comment_permalink%">%comment_preview% [...]</a></li>

<li><a href="%comment_author_url%">%comment_author%</a> says, <a href="%comment_permalink%">"%comment_preview%..."</a></li>

(Using Fresh Comment widget in your sidebar.)

Additional notes

I followed CSS Drive’s tableless form structure but I used tables where necessary. This release wouldn’t be made possible without the suggestions and request that I have gotten from Herrmueller’s comment, Inkiness’s trackback and Babak’s comment.

If there are any things you spot that is not working, do give me a notice and I’ll fix it as soon as possible. I’m not an experience PHP coder so please forgive me if anythings goes wrong. I tested this on WordPress version 2.03 only but it should work in any version that Sidebar Widgets can support.

The browsers tested are Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 and Mozilla Firefox 1.5. It didn’t work on Opera browser but I can’t do anything about it since WordPress Widgets don’t work there anyway.

Note that Fresh Comments 1.2.1 is out.

The source code for Fresh Comments 1.1 is distributed under GPL (General Public License), meaning that you can freely modify and distribute this source code.

Please do comment about my work.

Note that Fresh Comments 1.2.1 is out.

I’ve been slightly because this couple of weeks so you see my posts are lacking these days. I’ve been busy but the times are quite fun. I’ve been meeting and talking to quite a lot of people recently. Mostly are my pals in camp, I haven’t seen them for quite some time.

There are surprises as I walk around my neighborhood too. I’ve been meeting long lost friends - okay, not that long - basically just secondary school friends and stuff.

Also has occupied me is my Fresh Comments plugin. I lost touch so fast. I don’t know what I coded already. I revisited my code a couple of days ago and just literally shut my text processor off to play Ragnarok Online. But this afternoon I really went on to try to understand my codes.

I’ve been listening and I implemented a couple of extras to the existing plugin, notably:

# Ability to display fresh comments from static and published pages.
# Allows you to include the date or time of the posted comment in whichever format you wish so long as it follows the PHP date format.
# It is also neater. Yes, it’s quite neat already, but it just got neater again. The whole HTML portion is rewritten from a scratch so the structures are prettier. I use tables when necessary.
# Also, you can select if you want pingbacks or trackbacks to be listed. Okay, I got to be honest - I haven’t coded that part fully. It’s half-written and I had to rush off to a friend’s birthday.

I am aware that some users request for these:

* Cached Fresh Comments.
* Show fresh comments in categories.
* Private post’s comments are not shown to people who logged in.

The above 3 features are not implemented in the coming release (version 1.1). Fresh comments in categories are kinda hard. I mean it’s not hard to code but it’s just not that worth the trouble. I have to query MySQL too much to get that done. I have yet to figure out how to do caching too. And private posts… Well, I haven’t figured that one out too.

I’ll be releasing the plugin after more tests. Probably coming Monday or Tuesday if possible.

Opera 9 is out! This release is not a radical change. A couple of updates here and there. I notice they tried to consolidate some of the features too. Nothing pops out when you click on the address bar now. It feels strange after the upgrade but it’s definately a good move.

*New in version 9 is:*

* Widgets. Opera Widgets are tiny applications such as calculators, clocks and weathers. Just press F6 in Windows to get the Widgets out!
* In built BitTorrent support.
* Slight interfaces modifications such as tab previews. You can now mouseover on the tabs to get a preview.
* Better content blocking if you use that. I personally don’t.

If you’re using Opera, do upgrade!

Download Opera 9 now.