Skip to main content

Movable Type Recent Comments in Blogger

Recents Comments are a good measure for guessing the popularity of individual posts in a blog. Recent Comments are available in Movable Type blogs and if your blog is hosted on Blogger, you are out of luck.

So I have written a simple trick for Bloggers to add a "Recent Comments" sidebar in their blogs without migrating to MT. And just like Movable Type, the recent comments sidebar gets updated in real-time whenever a new comment is posted on the blog. Just follow the steps below:

1. I assume that you already have a main blog on Blogger where you like to incorporate Recent Comments. You need to create one more blog on Blogger that will be used for storing comments. You can give it any name but for this example, I will call my new blog as MTComments.



2. Now in Settings | Email of MTComments blog, specify a Mail-to-Blogger email address which you will use to send posts via email to this MTComments blog. The format of the email address is username.BLOGPOST@blogger.com. Change BLOGPOST to something more meaningful like mtcommentsemail.



3. Blogger sends notification by en email whenever new comments have been posted on your blog. We will make use of this feature to put all our comments in one place. Open your main blog control panel and Choose Setting | Comments - specify the email address choosen in Step 2 as Comment Notification Address. By doing so, we are automatically converting the comment notification email to a new post in the MTComments blog.

Update: For some reason, you cannot directly specify a blogger.com email address for comment notification. Hence, I would suggest you mention your gmail address here and create a rule in gmail to forword all your email from your main blog to the email address specified in step 2.

4. This is the last step. Using any of the free RSS-to-JavaScript services, you can convert the ATOM feed of your MTComments blog into simple Javascript. Add this javascript code into your main blog template wherever you like, click save and republish your entire blog. That's it.

Remember that the email address of Step 2 must be kept a secret. Otherwise, anyone who gets it will be able to post as you.

Popular posts from this blog

How to Download Contacts from Facebook To Outlook Address Book

Facebook users are not too pleased with the "walled garden" approach of Facebook. The reason is simple - while you can easily import your Outlook address book and GMail contacts into Facebook, the reverse path is closed. There's no "official" way to export your Facebook friends email addresses or contact phone numbers out as a CSV file so that you can sync the contacts data with Outlook, GMail or your BlackBerry. Some third-party Facebook hacks like "Facebook Sync" (for Mac) and "Facebook Downloader" (for Windows) did allow you to download your Facebook friends' names, emails, mobile phone number and profile photo to the desktop but they were quickly removed for violation of Facebook Terms of Use. How to Download Contacts from Facebook There are still some options to take Friends data outside the walls of Facebook wall. Facebook offers the Takeout option allowing you to download all Facebook data locally to the disk (include

Firefox Keyboard Shortcuts for Power Users

All features in Mozilla Firefox browser are accessible through the use of the keyboard. You can use shortcut keys to view and save Web pages, search the web, open new webpages, work with bookmarks, or find text on the current webpage. Some of the most common keyboard shortcuts in Mozilla Firefox are Ctrl+N (to open a new Firefox window), Ctrl+T (to open a new tab), Ctrl+F4 (to close the current tab) and Ctrl+S to save the current webpage. Mozilla Firefox supports many more powerful keyboard shortcuts. For instance, by pressing a simple key combination, you can manually delete autocomplete entries from the Firefox location bar or Web forms. I am sharing a list of my favorite Mozilla Firefox Keyboard Shortcuts that make web browsing with Firefox even more fun . And you also save your precious time as navigating through several layers of Firefox Toolbar menus is no longer necessary. 1. Web Search Ctrl+K moves the cursor to the Search Bar. You can then type in the terms you wish to fin

Digital Inspiration

Digital Inspiration is a popular tech blog by  Amit Agarwal . Our popular Google Scripts include  Gmail Mail Merge  (send personalized emails with Gmail ),  Document Studio (generate PDFs from Google Forms ) and   File Upload Forms ( receive files  in Google Drive). Also see  Reverse Image Mobile Search , Online Speech Recognition and Website Screenshots , the most useful websites on the Internet.