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Dan Rubin's SuperfluousBanter

Suffering from chronic idiocy since 1977

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Ridiculously Cool Comment Tools

The blo­gos­phere is being all inno­v­a­tive. Way to go! I’ve observed some
very cool com­ment tools and fea­tures over the last cou­ple of days. I’m
sup­posed to study hard for my last ever exam in my mas­ter degree. Oh well, you
know how that goes. Thus it was new blog check­ing time (so much for effec­tive
time man­age­ment).

Com­ment Preview

This is a very use­ful tool not only because it’s user friendly but also
because it’s just plain smart. Less server requests, less load and best
of all — less bull­shit. I spot­ted this cool fea­ture on blogs by Jon
Hicks and Shaun Inman.

Live comment preview

These two exam­ples just look so damn lick­able™ and are smartly imple­mented.
You can read how
Jon put this nifty fea­ture on his blog by check­ing his entry about the whole
process and the code behind it.

Com­ment Textarea

Aren’t tiny textar­eas a pain in the butt? What­ever, I think they are.
I hate scrolling all the time to see what I typed or make adjust­ments. But fear
no more, some­one thought of a solu­tion. I spot­ted this new (atleast to me) fea­ture
on Binary Bon­sai — blog of a scan­di­na­vian
fel­low by the name of Michael Heile­mann. By the way his web­site is worth a visit
— not only does he have good taste, his con­tent is worth­while too!

Change comment textarea size

Pretty cool stuff, eh? I think both these tools dra­mat­i­cally increase user
expe­ri­ence on blogs and make adding com­ments a breeze. Have you spot­ted other
cool new fea­tures? If so, let me know in the com­ments.

This item was posted by dhilhorst on Thursday, March 18th, 2004.

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9 comments on “Ridiculously Cool Comment Tools”

  1. Posted by Jon Hicks on Thursday, March 18th, 2004.

    Omni­web (Mac OS X browser) has a fan­tas­tic fea­ture to help with small textar­eas. It adds a small but­ton to the top of the scroll­bar area, which once clicked, opens up an edi­tor win­dow that you can resize and import text into. I love it!

  2. Posted by Adam Bramwell on Thursday, March 18th, 2004.

    Wid­gets like these make my day.

  3. Posted by Didier Hilhorst on Thursday, March 18th, 2004.

    @Jon

    Ugh, you painfully remind me I’m on Win­dows. I seri­ously need to get a Mac soon. It’s not that I think Win­dows is so ter­ri­ble, it’s more the fact that Apple is just a zil­lion times more sexy and lick­able. I need more lick­able stuff!

  4. Posted by DarkBlue on Thursday, March 18th, 2004.

    1) I think the con­trols to increase/decrease the height of the textarea are invalu­able and a worth­while inno­va­tion. It’s cer­tainly ben­e­fi­cial to the user.

    2) As John Hicks com­ments above, Omniweb’s textarea edi­tor win­dow seems to be another fan­tas­tic and user-friendly fea­ture (although I haven’t seen it myself).

    3) But the dynamic pre­view is not some­thing I enjoy. I find it hugely dis­tract­ing when writ­ing com­ments (the ani­ma­tion effect is quite annoy­ing). Also I find my eyes drawn to my scroll bar which is is con­stantly rescal­ing every­time word-wrap kicks in, or I hit [enter].

    I would also ques­tion the use­ful­ness of this, espe­cially if one has a resiz­able textarea. Surely you can pre­view as you type in the textarea itself — why do I need to look else­where for a preview?

    Fur­ther­more, I pre­fer the server gen­er­ated pre­view. This forces you to stop and check and can offer other ben­e­fits such as high­light­ing mis­spellings, ren­der­ing tags, cen­sor­ing, etc.

    Hav­ing said all that, I would add that I too love the level of inno­va­tion seen in weblogs, it’s great to see the bar­ri­ers pushed ever higher.

  5. Posted by -jul- on Thursday, March 18th, 2004.

    I did a small test on my Mac.

    Safari 1.2.1: pre­view OK, resiz­ing doesn’t work, form styling doesn’t work

    Opera 7.50 pre3: pre­view OK, resiz­ing OK, form styling doesn’t work

    Fire­fox 0.8: pre­view OK, resiz­ing OK, form styling OK

    Besides, I tried to cook a browser-based markup han­dler in JavaScript. It’s like BB tags, but there are a lot of exten­sions (for exam­ple [img “left dot­ted” /pic/illus.jpg This is a great illus­tra­tion] gen­er­ates <div class=“img left dotted”><img src=”/pic/illus.jpg” alt=“This is a great illus­tra­tion” /><div>This is a great illustration</div></div>). JavaScript does this very-very ugly. An hour ear­lier I would say “client gen­er­ated pre­view is good”. This is not true anymore.

  6. Posted by David House on Thursday, March 18th, 2004.

    Dun­stan (www.1976design.com/blog) has that Increase | Decrease textfield size wid­get as well.

  7. Posted by Michael Heilemann on Thursday, March 18th, 2004.

    Hey, and thanks for the kind words :)

    I’d just like to chime in with the facts before any­one gets the wrong idea: The resiz­ing of the textarea on my blog was 100% inspired by Dunstan’s blog. I’m using it with his permission :)

    And yeah, it _is_ a really cool fea­ture, I use it a lot (when I’m not in Safari :)).

  8. Posted by Jennifer Grucza on Thursday, March 18th, 2004.

    Hey, thanks for this arti­cle — it’s a great idea, and I prob­a­bly wouldn’t have come across it if you hadn’t posted about it. I think I’m going to take the same gen­eral idea and mod­ify it a bit for my own site.

  9. Posted by owen on Monday, March 22nd, 2004.

    Shaun Inman site is bitc..but any­way the pre­view thing is good but I like the link idea, so that peo­ple won’t have to fig­ure out the html/bbcode as much. I’ll have to try to get that implemeted at some point.