12 August

Comments are now working

Comments are now available, thanks to blogkomm. The process was nowhere near as easy as they make it out to be. For anyone looking to use blogkomm with nanoblogger, here are the steps I had to take:

1) Follow only steps one and two on blogkomm's howto. Blogkomm's author advises changing the name of the blogkomm directory to help thwart spambots, and I took this advice. Step two above is configuring blogkomm on your site. The script appears to be moderately hosed, so there are a couple things to keep in mind.

a) The interface language selection does not contain an option for English, even though en.php exists in the language folder. I had to edit the config file by hand to use English.

b) Editing the configuration via the setup script a second or subsequent time does not seem to load the existing values from the file (although it does appear to remember the admin uid and pwd); you will have to take care that you edit every value which is different from the default (and don't forget that you'll have to change the language to English by manually editing the file again).

c) I found the initial Textarea settings to be obnoxiously small. Consider doubling them.

2) I then edited nanoblogger files according to this advice from JensLog.

a) For the "/path_to_blogkomm_dir" path I used the full absolute path to the renamed blogkomm directory.
b) My css-linked templates already had lines starting with '<link rel="stylesheet"...'; I left these alone and added the new line below them.

3) I then had the option of renaming all my .hmtl files as .php. This seemed like too much hassle, so instead I set up apache to handle .html files as if they were .php. NB: I didn't use that technique myself, as fiatjustitia.net is no longer hosted in my basement. I used a tool provided by my hosting company to handle this, and it worked out of the box. If editing .htaccess doesn't work for you, you may have luck with renaming the files.

4) Then PHP was choking on this line at the top of index.html: "<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>". I tried commenting it out of all the nanoblogger template files, but PHP still choked. So I deleted the line altogether and it processed fine. I don't yet know if this has hosed RSS, but that's a minor concern I can address later.

5) Then, critically, I had to set the ENTRY_ARCHIVES variable in nanoblogger configuration to "1" in order to put each entry on its own page in the archive.

6) Joy. I still need to increase the size of the comment box. And the "captcha" image always seems to have the same text in it. But the hard part seems to be done.