Update: a lot of people are misunderstanding what this is and are flooding this entry with “test” comments. If you want to see this in action, go to my front page. Find an entry with comments and click “show comments here.” There’s nothing fancy about my comment submission system.
I’ve been wanting to do this for a while, and I finally got around to doing it. My inline comments (“show comments here”) are now fetched asynchronously. Or, for those of you who speak Web 2.0-ese: AJAX is teh l33t 4 tha inline commentz!
And for those of you who don’t know what the heck I’m talking about… my inline comments used to be downloaded when you viewed my front page. They were just hidden. Clicking the link would reveal them. The problem with this is that as my posting rate has slowed and my comment rate has risen, there can be quite a few “hidden” comments being downloaded, which slows things down, both in terms of bandwidth and server queries. Now, the comments aren’t loaded. When you click the link, they are asynchronously downloaded in the background (it’s so fast, you probably didn’t even notice). Pretty slick, eh?
I used Moo.ajax to do it. I experimented with some of the Moo.fx effects for bringing them in, but there were complications, and it didn’t look so great for posts with many comments. But I do like Moo.fx a lot, and am likely going to find a use for it somewhere on this site.
Update: I have gotten the Moo.fx effects working reliably! So check out the inline comments now… there is a “throbber” animation as they load (which should only show for a split second with broadband… longer on dialup), and then when they load, they fade in and expand down. The fade/expand effect is used again for subsequent expands/contracts (without downloading the comments again, obviously).
Aaron says
Are you going to pluginify it for us? š
JoeBruin88 says
Ditto to the previous commenter. I want this.
Rob says
Ditto the first two commenters.
And I’d still like to see an ajax comment posting plugin like you and I talked about that one time Mark. I still can’t get over how cool that was.
Mark says
Some of this could be made into a plugin, but it would still, unfortunately, require a good deal of work, because it needs to be integrated with your theme.
As for AJAX submission of comments… I’m still not sure that’s such a good idea. It sort of messes with the status quo, and confuses people. And because of anti-spam measures… sometimes it can take a while for the submission to go through… and during this time the person’s browser doesn’t seem to be “working” on submitting anything. So… I dunno about that.
Rob says
Party pooper.
š
drazin says
YES! please write a how-to atleast on how you did this! its awesome.
Sphagnum says
Plugify! Plugify! Plugify!
But if not, I would greatly appreciate a general how-to explanation so I can implement this on my own blog. I use the “Show comments right here” plugin and right now, with my blog being pretty small, the bandwidth is not an issue. But someday it will be.
Don says
This is great! I wish you’d release it as a plugin. š Great work dude!
Peter Kashou says
I’ve been working on integrating your great work into my site and I am having some problems getting my ajaxcomments.php populated with $comments or even $post. Can I ask how you brought over the post and comment data?
I can run some wpdb queries, but I need at least $post->ID to get any comment information.
Any help would be appreciated!
Mark says
Peter,
Then you can call your customized
comments_template()
function, or do a direct$comments = $wpdb->get_results( ... etc
Peter Kashou says
Just wanted to say thank you for the help!
I got it up and running and I would like to give you credit on my page for the work. Do you have any preference on how I do that (or even care if I do)? I will probably include it in my theme also if that’s alright with you.
I am still tweaking the css, but I’m really impressed with your coding. It’s helped me understand ajax much better.
Mark says
Glad to hear you got it figured out! I always like credit. š A link to the front page with my name (Mark Jaquith) would be great.
Sphagnum says
FYI, this has now been pluginified over at nymb.us (info) Similar idea as Mark has here…
JoeBruin88 says
Sphagnum, this plugin does not seem to be the same thing as Mark’s idea here. The plugin appears to function like taking one to the permalink page.
Sphagnum says
You lost me, taking one to the permalink page?
JoeBruin88 says
Yeah, check out this person’s blog, which is supposed to have imlemented the plugin. It’s just a “smoothed” over link to the permalink page with comments.
Sphagnum says
If you were talking about this site, the plugin is not working there. You can see it on the site that I linked to. The second site doens’t link to the comments page, it pulls the rss feed when you click the link and then creates a div in which to put the comments it just found. Go look, you’ll see. Then tell me what I’m still missing.
JoeBruin88 says
It’s to tell what it does because when I click on the links to expand comments, it starts to open an RSS feed in my aggregator, so I can’t really tell if it’s working right.
Mark says
What RSS feed? That doesn’t make any sense. It’s not a
feed:
link.JoeBruin88 says
All the “Expand Comments” links on this site here contain RSS feeds.
Mark says
Yep, those links point to RSS feeds. He should be using a JavaScript
onclick
action and returningfalse
to prevent that link from being followed (or some other method, that’s just the one I know.) But you’re not having that issue here are you? Note that I am not using his plugin, I coded my own version.JoeBruin88 says
Nah, someone made a comment about how a plugin was written that does this. And I commented that it does not do the same thing as what you did on your site.
Sphagnum says
I know it’s not the same, I was just pointing out that it has the same effect of loading the comments onclick instead of on pageload. That’s all…
Peter Kashou says
In case you guys wanted to get ajax comments working, I have implemented Mark’s work into my ‘tonus’ theme. It only takes a dozen lines of code or so and some work with the css styling to get it into whatever theme you are running. I might try writing a plugin for it, but the css wouldn’t match whatever theme you were running.
tonus homepage: tonus
JoeBruin88 says
Peter, It looks good. I like how it works.
What are the lines of code and where do they go?
Peter Kashou says
I finally got around to trying to make a plugin for the inline ajax comments. The page for it is here.
My first attempt at a plugin, so let me know of any problems.
Matt says
Looking for a demo?
Van says
Good site! I found in google.com B
bla says
Just another test š
YH says
Now i was thinking, Inline + nested comments + ability to add comment inline too would be something but it would probably be a monster of a plugin..
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Talk Topic says
Is there a download link for this? Could you please share with us? Thanks
McPace says
So you still have the inline comment deal? Seems like everyone deserted this. I’m using the old expand comments plugin and I’m trying to find a replacement to upgrade but no one makes em anymore? Did I miss something?
ABCD says
So you still have the inline comment deal? Seems like everyone deserted this. Iām using the old expand comments plugin and Iām trying to find a replacement to upgrade but no one makes em anymore? Did I miss something?
Mark says
Nah, I deserted it too.