dotcomments installer
Unless someone else decides to go down the Blogvoices, Reblogger, BlogBack and Snorcomments path (and why would they?), I’m afraid that remotely-hosted dotcomments is next in line. After months of light activity, the main comment and source of support is getting a bit more active.
So, since the hurdle of ftping a couple of files, creating a directory, and chmodding them, and pasting a couple of bits of script in a Blogger template is a bit high for some people, and since I’m teaching myself PHP anyway, I got to thinking about a PHP install program for it, which would ask for your Blogger and Barrysworld usernames and passwords, let you customize the colors and fonts in dotcomments, and then create the directory, send the files, set the permissions, get your template through the API, insert the script, publish the blog, and open it in a “there you go” window.
The unexpectedly most-difficult part? Finding a place in the Blogger template to put the scripts. It’s fairly obvious that finding the right spot for the script that displays the comment link would be difficult, since there isn’t any real standard for what ought to be in a byline, much less where the byline should be, but what’s less obvious is that finding the <head> of many Blogger templates is no less difficult. I would have thought that the first thing anyone would learn about HTML would be that an HTML page has the following structure:
<html>
<head>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>
with no exceptions, nothing between </head> and <body>, and one-and-only-one of each tag. Sadly, a Blogger template is just as likely to have two or more <body> tags and no </head> tag at all. So template parsing will have to involve dozens of possible solutions: find a </head> and go before it, find the first <body> and treat it as an implied </head>, find no <body> and no </head> and delete the whole damn template…
One of the best things about Blogger is that you can put anything you like in your template, as long as it has <Blogger> and </Blogger> somewhere in it. One of the worst things about Blogger is that you can put anything you like in your template, as long as it has <Blogger> and </Blogger> somewhere in it.
Heh. Spoke too soon about nobody wanting to follow Snorcomments: somebody is in beta with YABV.