Some eThreads Changes over at blogdowntown

Tuesday, November 22, 2005, at 07:21PM

By Eric Richardson

I installed some new eThreads code tonight. Nothing earth-shattering, but I implemented a couple fun new bits over on blogdowntown.

First, author information is now includes with posts (as evidenced in the little "By e;" on all the posts). That may seem like a no-brainer, but oddly it required creating the idea of symlinks in eThreads' internal tree of values to implement cleanly (if 20 posts all have the same author we only want one copy of the author's info in memory).

Second, I added the title of the post to the "Recent Comments" list in the right sidebar. This again sounds easy, but eThreads keeps blog stuff and comments completely separate. The comments code doesn't care what you're responding to, and the blog code has no conception of comments. This can let you do really funky things like having two looks for a blog, and having each look tie a different set of comments onto the blog posts. In this case I solved the bridge problem by allowing the user to pass a 'titles' argument to the RecentComments plugin and having the plugin look up the title in the appropriate place from that.

I also made a few CSS changes to the site, but nothing major. I do like getting rid of the colored links in the sidebar lists and doing the rollover coloring instead. I think that's less distracting from the content.