A Note on Comments

February 2nd, 2008

I noticed increased rumblings in Planet Intertwingly against anonymous commenters. I maintain a short lease on anyone commenting who doesn't provide a real email address or who I don't know, primarily because I don't know if the person is putting an innocuous comment in to bypass 'must have approved comment' security for later spam. Other than that, though, I'm not adverse to anonymous comments.

I have, however, put all comments into moderation. I'm still attempting to make the comments XHTML-bullet proof, and 'bad' characters or markup in a comment breaks the page for everyone. With moderation, I can catch such breakage before it hits the published page. When I feel I have robust filters in place, I'll turn open comments back on.

In addition, comments about spelling or grammatical errors, as well as those noting problems with the site technology, while appreciated and welcome, won't be published. I consider comments of that nature more of a private note to me.

Yes, the SVG clock now reflects your time, not mine.

Comments
1
Tom Passin - 6:45 pm February 2, 2008

"Yes, the SVG clock now reflects your time, not mine."

Err, it's an hour to early for me. Firefox, WinXP, Eastern Time Zone.

Otherwise, the clock's very nice!

2
David Dorward - 3:56 am February 3, 2008

I'm pulling in a number of RSS and ATOM feeds to build one page, some have XHTML content and some have HTML content, and might have errors in them. My solution is to run them through Tidy.

Another option is to wrap the data in a basic template and push it through a validator (I'd use WebService::Validator::HTML::W3C to access a local install of the W3C Markup Validator web service), then complain to the user if they make any errors. The downside of this option is that error messages can put some users off.

3
Aristotle Pagaltzis - 4:51 am February 3, 2008

The clock’s either 7 hours behind or 5 hours ahead of my time (which would be CET).

4
phiji - 6:54 am February 3, 2008

Hi Shelley,

"Yes, the SVG clock now reflects your time, not mine."
Err, that's not true in Paris, France too. Our time is 13h54, yours is 7h54.
Otherwise, what's the interest of knowing my time ?

5
Shelley - 7:20 am February 3, 2008

David, I don't want to use a service, I'd rather use a local XML validator. But yes, rather than clean the input I may just put it against a validator and reject it if it doesn't come out clean.

Aristotle, Tom JavaScript Date should be pulling from your system time. There might have been a caching issue.

"what's the interest of knowing my time"

Good point. I've removed the clock.

update and replaced it with one inline into the XHTML, which also reflects the sampled color from the rest of the page. And set the time back to St. Louis. This works out better for the comments, because then people can compare the comment time with the sidebar time, and know how long ago the comment was made.

I've also added in a time at the server, including am/pm. Those with scripting disabled will now have a time, too.

6
Bud Gibson - 4:01 pm February 3, 2008

I like the return to St. Louis time as that is a distinctive feature of this blog. The color scheme is neat. In FF2, I'm getting a big vertical space before and after the clock though.

7
Shelley - 6:01 pm February 3, 2008

Inline SVG does need a surrounding DIV element or it can cause some problems. It should be fixed now.

8
phiji - 3:00 pm February 4, 2008

Happy to see the watch back with >>>your<<< time, wich is more informative for us. Thanks!

Thanks to all those who have contributed to the discussion. Comments are now closed, but you can contact the author of the post directly.

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