New Tools On This Blog

Subscribe to com­ments on my blog! Perform push-button for­mat­ting on your com­ments (and new posts even)!

I’m very excit­ed (but incred­i­bly weary) after build­ing into this here blog some new and cool features/plugins. They’re so cool, in fact, that I’m think­ing about pack­ag­ing them up for sharing.

Formatting Toolbar in action on the Post to MT Weblog pop­up. The tan col­or is because that’s the col­or of my Windows tool­bars. The Formatting Toolbar looks just like any appli­ca­tion tool­bar, so for most peo­ple it will appear grey in actu­al use. Not shown: Paragraph align­ment but­tons added since begin­ning this post. 

First, I added the Subscribe to Comments plu­g­in, and hacked up the code quite a bit to make it fit my site’s UI. It’s a roy­al pain to leave a pithy com­ment on some­one’s blog and have to come back day after day just to see if there was a response. Now, when you leave a com­ment on my blog, you can choose to be noti­fied via e‑mail of com­ments post­ed to the same topic.

Since I start­ed my blog with GreyMatter and then moved over to Movable Type, I’ve want­ed a way for peo­ple to sub­scribe to posts and com­ments that inter­est them. However, it’s been a real bitch to find some­thing that works. I even tried an ear­li­er ver­sion of Subscribe to Comments and could­n’t get it to func­tion. Now it works.

On the com­ment forms, the Formatting Toolbar, styled for the blog–each instance is cus­tomiz­able based on the cur­rent blog’s stylesheet–is a lit­tle slim­mer, ommit­ting some of the more advanced fea­tures required only by the blog owner. 

The oth­er real­ly (and more!) cool thing I added is what I’m call­ing the Formatting Toolbar. I found a basic tag-insertion bar for com­ments in use on an unre­lat­ed page at MT​-Plugins​.org, but could­n’t find a deliv­er­able copy any­where. So, I, um bor­rowed the code, rewrote the major­i­ty of it, expand­ed it, and made it more use­ful (to me, and hope­ful­ly to you). Not only does the for­mat­ting tool­bar work with com­ments forms, but also with new and edit posts forms, includ­ing the book­marklet popup.

This was the biggest deal for me. Yeah, it’ll be nice to have but­tons that save me the (very) minor incon­ve­nience of typ­ing <B></B>, <I></I>, and <div class=“blogcode”></div> in my posts, but that’s not a very big deal. I write HTML in my sleep. The real time savers are the oth­er but­tons I’ve built in: for instance, the but­ton that inserts the twenty-two four­teen (I got a CSS inspi­ra­tion) lines of code that cre­ate quot­ed text in the main posts (out­side com­ments). Until today, I kept a sep­a­rate page online in a pri­vate area of my site so that I could just copy these large blocks of code from form fields into the pop­up Post to MT Weblog win­dow. Now I don’t have to nav­i­gate anoth­er brows­er win­dow to my codes page just to fire off a quick post. Now I just click a button.

This thrills me, though I’m so fried from mung­ing my way through half of MT’s code that you real­ly can’t tell.

Anyway, so I hacked up sev­er­al .tpml files to get my Formatting Toolbar into the new and edit posts forms, replac­ing the rudi­men­ta­ry Bold, Italic, Underline, and URL but­tons pro­vid­ed with MT.

It’s so use­ful in fact, that I think I’ll try to find the own­er of MT​-Plugins​.org and ask her if I she’d mind if I pack­aged up and gave away the Formatting Toolbar, which, again, includes some of her code, as a MT plu­g­in. That’ll be anoth­er day, how­ev­er. I’m just real­ly fried.

Just show­ing off the new styles for quot­ed text (in com­ments; it’s much dif­fer­ent in full posts) and code text. Each exam­ple was for­mat­ted by click­ing a sin­gle button. 

The Formatting Toolbar is live on the com­ments form for all posts on this blog. Feel free to try it–and the sub­scribe plugin–by send­ing me a comment.