Comment Icons
September 30th, 2003 11:02 PMFollowing some of the RDF discussions from the previous post, I’ve got shiny new icons attached to comments (see the Bluetooth GPG post for an example).
What’s happening is this: My MT template is making use of a new tag, <$MTCommentAuthorIcon$>. If:
- The author of a comment filled in the URL field, and
- The URL references a page with RSS feeds that I can find with RSS auto-discovery, and
- The RSS feed contains image data,
Then I add a div tag containing the (first) image (and optional link) to the beginning of the comment. The image is then styled with CSS that currently floats the div to the left and puts a border around it.
I’ve got some reservations about how I’m doing this right now. For one, I’m pulling the image data off of a potentially foreign webserver (my icon — the only icon in use at the moment — happens to be on the local server). This could be an issue if people wanted to fill in the URL field, but didn’t want my weblog pulling image data off of their server. Another issue is that very few people seem to use the image data in an RSS feed; I’m considering adding FOAF support (hello co-depiction readers :), but from my (albeit brief) investigation, the images used with foaf:depicts are too big to reasonably put into a comment block. RSS images seem to commonly be small enough that this isn’t a problem.
So, what do you think? Is this worthwhile? Should I be more intelligent in choosing the image to use if there are multiple possibilities? Should I prefer foaf:depicts images, but scale them to fit? Should I be downloading the images and pulling them off of the local server? I don’t know about the implications of this implementation, but I certainly like the look.
Update: Here’s a wacky idea I just had. I could query my gpg keyring for icons based on the email field instead of (in preference to) the URL. Thoughts?
RSS/ATOM Jeremy Allaire: RSS-Data: A Proposed Format and More discussion on RSS/XML-Data decafbad: RSS-Data: XML-RPC encoding in RSS 2.0… [Read More]
Posted at: hebig.org/blog, Quick Links - October 02 on October 2, 2003 04:02 AM