Schinckel.net

I can’t recall if this came up on the Blogsome forums or not, but some people are keen to seperate Trackbacks and Comments in the comment list. Sometimes, and especially for people new to blogs, Trackbacks don’t seem to make that much sense, so I thought I would try doing this on Blogsome. Googling seperate trackbacks comments wordpress turned up several sites, the first one I visited was from way back in July 2004, and was way to complicated to bother with.

The second one was better, and gave me the idea of how to do it. Then I remembered that there is a Template Tag called comment_type. I duplicated the main comment: the commentlist and the {foreach} that cycles through each comment, and used the following bit of code to get the {comment_type} into a variable (so I can test it):

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    {capture name=comment_type}{comment_type}{/capture}

It’s a simple matter to test this against a known value:

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    {if $smarty.capture.comment_type != 'Comment'}

And you know that you are working with a Trackback or Pingback. The first iteration of the commentlist only displays non-comments, the second only displays comments (it uses == 'Comment' instead). The last tricky bit was to figure out how to show Trackbacks from my own site in the class='owner' format (on here, in a reddish box rather than green). This required a little trick I had discovered earlier today:

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    {capture name=author_trackback}trackback@{bloginfo show='url'}{/capture}

And then the test is:

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    {if $smarty.capture.reader == $smarty.capture.author_trackback|replace:'http://':''}

(This assumes you have used my previous method for styling your own comments differently). The full text of my comments.html template then:

    <div id="commentarea">
    {if $post->ping_status}
        <p class='indented'>{_e text='The <acronym title="Uniform Resource Identifier">URI</acronym> to TrackBack this entry is:'} <em>{trackback_url}</em></p>
    {/if}
    
    <p class='indented'>{comments_rss_link link_text='<span class="rss"><abbr title="Really Simple Syndication">RSS</abbr></span> feed for comments on this post.'}</p>
    
    <h3 class="comments">{comments_number zero="Responses" one="1 Response" more="% Responses"} to &#8220;{the_title}&#8221;
    {if $post->comment_status == 'open'}
    <a href="#postcomment" title="{_e text='Leave a comment';}">&raquo;</a>
    {/if}
    </h3>
    
    {if $comments != ''}
      {capture name=author}{the_author_email}{/capture}
      {capture name=author_trackback}trackback@{bloginfo show='url'}{/capture}
    
      <h3 class="comments">Trackbacks / Pingbacks</h3>
      <ol class="commentlist">
      {foreach from=$comments key=key item=comment}
        {globalvar var='comment' value=$comment}
        {capture name=comment_type}{comment_type}{/capture}
        {if $smarty.capture.comment_type != 'Comment'}
            {capture name=reader}{comment_author_email}{/capture}
            {if $smarty.capture.reader == $smarty.capture.author_trackback|replace:'http://':''}
            <li class="owner" id="comment-{comment_ID}">
            {else}
            <li class="alt" id="comment-{comment_ID}">
            {/if}
            From the site {comment_author_link}:
        {comment_text}
            Posted on {comment_date} at {comment_time}.
            {edit_comment_link text="Edit this trackback", before='<span class="button">' after="</span>"}
        </li>
        {/if}
      {/foreach}
      </ol>
    
      <h3 class="comments">Comments</h3>
      <ol class="commentlist">
      {foreach from=$comments key=key item=comment}
        {globalvar var='comment' value=$comment}
        {capture name=comment_type}{comment_type}{/capture}
        {if $smarty.capture.comment_type == 'Comment'}
            {capture name=reader}{comment_author_email}{/capture}
            {if $smarty.capture.reader == $smarty.capture.author}
        <li class="owner" id="comment-{comment_ID}">
            {else}
        <li class="alt" id="comment-{comment_ID}">
            {/if}
                <script type="text/javascript">document.write('<div class="right"><img src="http://www.gravatar.com/avatar.php?gravatar_id='); document.write(hex_md5("{comment_author_email}")); document.write('&size=50" /><\/div>'); </script>
                On <a href="#comment-{comment_ID}">{comment_date} at {comment_time}</a>, {comment_author_link} said: 
              {comment_text}
                {edit_comment_link text="Edit this comment", before='<span class="button">' after="</span>"}
        </li>
         {/if}
      {/foreach}
      </ol>
    
    {else} _<!-- this is displayed if there are no comments so far -->_
        <p class='indented'>{_e text="No comments yet."}</p>
    {/if}
    
    <h3  class="comments">{_e text="Leave a Reply"}</h3>
    {if 'open' == $post->comment_status}
         <form action="{$siteurl}/wp-comments-post.php" method="post" id="commentform">
        <p>
          <input type="text" name="author" id="author" class="textarea" value="{insert name=var var=comment_author}" size="28" tabindex="1" />
           <label for="author">{_e text="Name"}</label> {if $req != ''} {_e text='(required)'} {/if}
        <input type="hidden" name="comment_post_ID" value="{$post->ID}" />
        <input type="hidden" name="redirect_to" value="{$redirect_to}" />
        </p>
    
        <p>
          <input type="text" name="email" id="email" value="{insert name=var var=comment_author_email}" size="28" tabindex="2" />
           <label for="email">{_e text="E-mail"}</label> {if $req != ''} {_e text='(required)'}{/if}
        </p>
    
        <p>
          <input type="text" name="url" id="url" value="{insert name=var var=comment_author_url}" size="28" tabindex="3" />
           <label for="url">{_e text="<acronym title='Uniform Resource Identifier'>URI</acronym>"}</label>
        </p>
    
        <p>
          <label for="comment">{_e text="Your Comment"}</label>
        <br />
          <textarea name="comment" id="comment" cols="60" rows="12" tabindex="4"></textarea>
              <input type="hidden" id="textarea_next_time" name="textarea_next_time" value="60,12" />
        </p>
    
        <p>
          _<!--input disabled name="preview" type="image" tabindex="5" src="/images/preview.png" size="75%" /-->_
          <input name="submit" type="image" tabindex="6" src="/images/post_comment.png" size="75%" />
        </p>
    
    <p>{_e text="Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, <acronym title='Hypertext Markup Language'>HTML</acronym> allowed:"} <code>{allowed_tags}</code>, 'Smart' Smileys.</p>
    
    
    </form>
    {else} _<!-- comments are closed -->_
    <p>{_e text="Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time."}</p>
    {/if}
    </div>

Using some classy CSS, you can make text flow nicely around images, rather than having to set stuff up using tables, and demonstrated in this post. Basically, you just put the following into your CSS file:

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    .left {
        float:left;
    }
    
    .right {
        float:right;
    }

And then wrap the image in <div class='left'> ... </div> tags (or class='right' to make it sit on the right of the text). You can use margin:15 0 15 25; for example to put a margin of 15 on the top, 0 on the right, 15 on the bottom and 25 on the left, so that the text does not come right up against the image. I also change some text properties in my CSS, so I can include a caption inside the <div class='left/right'> ... </div> tags and it will be italic, centred and so on. I’ll leave these as an exercise to the reader. If you just use the code above, you can also use this whenever you have post-links, or page-links, so that one always appears on the left, and the other on the right. I have now removed every table from the site, except the one on the page this article links to.

DHTML Lemmings That’s right: the great old favourite, Lemmings, implemented in DHTML. Luckily you can turn the music off. “Oh No!” Kaboom

It would be nice to be able to have a links and/or archive page under blogsome: that just had a list of all links, or a list of all posts/months/days (whatever). The problem is that Pages cannot use template tags, and it is not much fun to update these pages by hand. A solution presented itself to me today, and it goes like this:

    {if $smarty.server.REQUEST_URI == '/links/'}
        {get_links_list}
    {elseif $smarty.server.REQUEST_URI == '/archives/'}
        {get_archives type='postbypost' limit='' format='html'}
    {/if}

This code can go into the Main Page template, just after {content}, or into the post.html template if you’ve used my previous hack to get Pages processed by the post template. You’ll also need to create Pages: Links and Archives (if you use different names, be sure to ensure the page-slug is the one that is listed in the code above). I had to put a <br /> into each Page in order to get rid of all errors. You can see the results here: Archives, Links. It’s more than likely that a similar solution exists for categories: I’ll do that too. Update: Categories, Pages. Note: Make sure you have the slash following the URL when you try to access them. It may be possible to have a double {if} clause (with slash and without), but I’m not sure yet… later works a treat:

     {if $smarty.server.REQUEST_URI == '/links/' || $smarty.server.REQUEST_URI == '/links'}
        {get_links_list}

And so on…

If I dig a very deep hole, where I go to stop? This is something I needed as a kid. Remember digging holes at the beach, and wondering whether you could “dig right through to China”. Well, if you dig straight down from Robe, South Australia, you end up in…the middle of the ocean. Oh well. Nice idea while it lasted. Won’t be able to pull the wool over little Jack’s eyes in the future…

I’m not sure if this is new for version 5 of iTunes, but I hated how if I listened to an album where the tracks are supposed to be played together, like most of the tracks on Ministry of Sound Chillout Sessions 4, there was a gap between tracks. When, like after Disc 2, Track 18: De Nuit • All That Mattered, and leading into track 19: 2 Heads • Out of the City, it should be unnoticeable when one track ends and the other begins. Solution: set up iTunes âžž Preferences… (⌘,) Playback as shown below:

Culture Snob | Movies | The Phantom Nuance This totally sums up my opinion of the most recent Star Wars film, and much more eloquently than I ever did. Culture Snob, you are going to be on my RSS feed.

While trying to solve someone elses problems, I came across the following: If you call {have_posts}, this will return a number as long as you are not on the last post to be displayed on the page. This is a standard WP function, but it is interesting to see it works under WP-MU. {the_post} will increment the post counter: basically skip a post, but will cause SQL errors. • My biggest hassle so far is that it doesn’t seem to be possible to assign stuff created by template tags to variables, other than by the very ugly {capture name=foo}{bar}{/capture} ; {$smarty.capture.foo} trick, which doesn’t work for Arrays: it just sets $smarty.capture.foo to ‘Array’, not very much use at all. {section} might be promising, but I doubt it: {foreach value=get_the_category item=each}{$each}{/foreach} just returns ‘get_the_category’.

My japanese name is 中村 Nakamura (center of the village) 誠 Makoto (sincerity).
Take your real japanese name generator! today!
Created with Rum and Monkey’s Name Generator Generator.

Jaq’s is 藤原 Fujiwara (wisteria fields) 千秋 Chiaki (very fine in autumn). Amusingly, if you use Matt and Jaqueline, you get the same first name. Deep. 松尾 Matsuo (tail of a pine tree).

Those of you who actually know me may know I’ve been off work for nearly a week: I’ve had some sort of a viral infection, which resulted in me having horrible head and body aches, sweating and coughing fits. I’m almost all better now (was about to leave for work this mornng at 7:30 when I got all lightheaded and needed to call in sick. Daily Manager wasn’t happy - supposed to call in by 7:00am when not coming in), but it really held me down. To the extent I wasn’t able to write anything on my blog. For 5 days!