Google Blogger has no way of publishing recent comments, properly sorted, in the sidebar for anyone who uses their own website design as a template.

The “New Blogger” supports this, but I like keeping my own style (such as it is).

So what I’ve done is created a second Blogger blog, had Blogger forward my comments from my main “real” blog to my Google Gmail address, and, from there, Gmail forwards them to my new Blogger blog’s publish-by-email feature and automatically publishes them as if they were posts.

Then, I grab the RSS xml feed “feed” from that blog, run it through a Javascript called “Hearsay” developed by Greg from Freshblog, and voila, recent comments.

Brilliant solution.

Alas, I am not an expert with Javascript and the dates are giving an error, which is why you may see something like:

Commentator Name (just now) on Blog Post’s Title:

Text of the comment…

… and a tool tip error when you hover over it if you really pay attention.

Not quite the effect I was looking for. So let’s see if the fine fellow from Melbourne who wrote the script a year ago as a public service will still support it.

He helped someone else out 5-days ago, so I am crossing my fingers!

UPDATE 7:54 AM: Greg replied from the other side of the world almost immediately and helped me fix the problem. I wanted to drop the dates and wasn’t sure how. Thanks.

UPDATE Monday September 23rd: I migrated to WordPress.

By Christoph Dollis at 4:31 AM on Thursday August 30th, 2007, and filed under Blogging, Web Design.

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