Mucking about, part 2, plus "recent comments"

I was a little frustrated last night (i.e., early this morning) because I couldn't seem to get my blog feed to display correctly on my custom Google home page. After a while I began to realize that there are some serious delay issues between the time one changes posts (like editing them to have actual post titles) and the time those changes begin to show up via the feed. It's understandable, I'm sure, but I've never worked with such things before so I had not yet achieved that true understanding that comes with personal experience. So while my frustration index was high I called it a night and hoped that things would look better (later) in the morning.

And much to my surprise the Google display does look better now. It's still not quite right, but it's close enough in that my blog posts now display as titles alone which was my goal. The problem is that (as I mentioned in my previous post) I had to edit each and every blog entry I ever made in order to convert it to use an actual title field since I somehow managed to turn off that option way back at the genesis of this blog. Then while I was editing entries, I ended up fixing a few other things as well, like misspellings, formatting blockquotes to a slightly more standard style, etc., just whatever might catch my eye as needing a tweak.

It turns out that the blog feed to Google displays in order of post modification, not creation. Consequently my Google home page display of blog entries shows some old entries as more current than they should be. I'm sure this is a valid practice since it allows modified posts to show up higher on the posting order to alert folks that something has changed. In this instance, such changes are bogus because I really was just tweaking general formatting issues, not content. But Blogger doesn't know that.

As a result, I've learned... Don't edit an old entry to modify it unless it's very recent. Instead, post updates to older entries by just making an entirely new entry—I can always provide a direct link back to the older post anyway since I know what I'm updating.

I could—and might yet—go back and edit the last nine posts (the max my Google home page can display from a feed) in order from oldest to newest so as to force them into the feed in the correct order. I'm not sure it's worth the trouble, really, but in theory it should be doable. I'm sure no one cares, but just thought I'd mention it. At any rate even if I don't edit posts to force them to be newer feeds this issue should only be a problem for the short term. As new posts pile up they will take their rightful places in turn at the top of the food chain, er, feed list.

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Aside from all that useless trivia, here's another bit which is actually halfway useful to not just myself (as blog creator/administrator), but to blog readers as well... I found out how to add a list of links to "recent comments" over in the sidebar area. While perusing Blogger help pages for info re site feeds this page explaining "Recent comments in the sidebar" caught my eye. A simple cut-n-paste of code from there to my template did the trick.

I'm not sure how they define "recent," whether by a certain date range or by "last X number" of comments. For a blog which admittedly gets as little traffic as this one it barely matters. It provides a nice handy way to see at a glance if there have been any comments of late and that's good enough for me. I wish it would let you provide the link to the comment by specifying the blog entry title instead of the date and time of the comment, but date and time will have to suffice. I may try to find out if there's a way to change it, but I'm doubting it since the original posts themselves have their permalinks established via the timestamp of the entry and not associated with the title.