Well, I thought this one would
prove impossible, but I devised a hack to do it anyway—on
Mozilla only, however: now, if you browse this 'blog using Mozilla (possibly only a recent
version), each entry's Comments
link should have next to it, in
parentheses, the number of comments posted on that entry, and the
timestamp of the most recent one. If you don't see anything, it can
mean several things: the system might not be functioning, or there are
no comments, or your browser is not Mozilla. I can't think of a way
that would print something different in each of these cases—or I
can, but it's too ugly.
This is not a gratuitous way of saying please use Mozilla
,
by the way: I really don't know how the same result could be achieved
without using the Extensible Binding
Language, one of these really cool Mozilla inventions. For those
who wish to know a little how the trick is achieved (remember that I
can't specially modify the 'blog's HTML itself, because
it sits on a different server), it's simple, really: after every
Comments
link comes an empty <span>
element,
which specifies by a style property that it is to be controlled by an
XBL binding which sits on the same server where the
comments are stored (my home PC, that is), and the
XBL bindings just add the (“anonymous” in
Mozilla terminology) content that you see next to the link. If
anything goes wrong, the bindings are not served, and you don't see
anything, but there's no harm done (and the 'blog page can be viewed
without problem). I'm not sure how this will interact with the cache,
however: it seems that the XBL file is reloaded
independently from its calling HTML file, but I'm not
entirely certain of it either (these HTTP cache questions
are really thorny). We'll see.
Please let me know of any strange behavior you might observe.
(For those who cannot, will not, or for any other reason do not use
Mozilla, the best I can suggest is that you click on the
Comments
link of any entry and then follow the Recent
comments
link.)