The Playground

Live comment previewing shows you exactly what you type (as you type it), just below the comment textbox. It saves the need for opening another page to preview your comments. There's a tutorial on Learning Movable Type that gives you the step by step instructions on how to implement the code, and after a few template tweaks it's done.

I've recently upgraded to MT 3.32 and while implementing the live comment preview on my individual entry template, I noticed two posted lines after the comments. A closer look at the code showed me the second one was "experimental", and so I deleted the line. After rebuilding the individual indexes there were no problems, so I'm guessing this is a bug and will perhaps be corrected with the next upgrade.

I have been thinking about implementing a different style for my own comments and have read how to do this on a couple of blogs and decided today was the day. Getting the CSS right will be the hardest part. That will be different for everyone.

First I had to download the Compare plugin from Staggernation. This adds some conditional tags that enable you to compare one thing to another and do something based on the results. There's examples for other uses of this plugin on the download page. You just upload the file to the plugins directory. There's no configuration to worry about.

The next step is to add the compare code to the comments section in the individual entry template. You need to change the "xxx@yyy.com" to your author email. Be sure to rebuild the individual archives after you add the code.