Harrisonburg Blogs

Now Serving Your Comments!

The big new development today is that the site now pulls in remote blog comments to the homepage (see the recent comments section just under the local news section). I could have done this a long time ago, but my fear was that a lot of spam would be pulled in along with legitimate comments. I’m not too worried about spam on hosted blogs because all the blogs use the Bad Behavior plugin, and I’ve made it extremely easy to activate Akismet. But I don’t have any way of ensuring that rss bloggers are keeping their own spam under control.

Anyway, after spending more time on the blogs currently being indexed, I didn’t notice comment spam as really being a problem, so I decided to go ahead and start pulling in comments from those blogs that publish a comments feed (about 80%). If comment spam becomes an issue for any individual blog, I can go ahead and stop bringing in comments on a blog-by-blog basis without affecting the rest.

Now there is one other big development, which hopefully you won’t notice (unless you have a slow connection to the internet, in which case hopefully you’ll notice a speedup). The post entries are now being pulled up through “lazy-loading,” which means that instead of pulling in all the posts when the page first loads, and then hiding them until they’re expanded, individual posts only get pulled in when you hold your mouse over their titles. The process is fast, but if you’re quick, you can see the post excerpt expand without showing the entire entry. If this happens, just close and re-open the post.

Unfortunately, I’ve already encountered some buggy behavior with the lazy loading, and if it seems bad enough, I may have to just go back to loading all the posts when the home page loads. We’ll see.

If you notice any bugs anywhere on the site, or if some aspect of the site should be changed or improved, please leave a comment and I’ll see if I can take care of it. If there are a whole lot of comments I’ll create a separate bug reporting page. I don’t know if that will be necessary, but I know there are always going to be bugs I simply won’t notice without help.