Testing a site-wide posts plugin

I’ve got a few testbeds splattered across my site right now for the purposes of testing a plugin that I’d like to pressgang into use network-wide. One major problem we’ve had historically is a lack of visibility from one blog to another. With everyone lamenting that Ed Brayton is leaving, and that that’s the only blog they read (outside Pharyngula), those of us hardscrabble waifs fighting over the crumbs of traffic after the big men get their share, I’d like to make sure that the fact that we’re scrambling for those crumbs is perfectly apparent to everyone.

You eagle-eyed readers have probably noticed that I have three new pages on my blog: Random Network Posts, Last 50 Posts, and Last 2 Posts on Each Blog.

The first shows a completely random post from every single blog that is both public and not rated Mature (as Taslima and Maryam’s blogs are — by necessity, to keep Google from freaking out about their frequently posting things like pictures of acid attack victims, etc). The second shows a sort of feed-like view, with the last 50 posts across the network (and three more pages of 50 if you want to drill backward). The third is something approximating the old homepage, with the last two posts from every single blog — sadly, with no visual break between the blogs, and unfortunately, with the two posts reversed time-wise.

Also, my widget does something unique — it shows the latest post from the last ten blogs that have written a post, rather than displaying the last ten blog posts in toto. This still advantages frequent-posters like Pharyngula, in that it’ll probably always be in that top ten, but it doesn’t spam out the rest of us.

The visuals are absolutely shit, right now, though. It’s not suitable as a front page in its current form. But with some CSS massaging, and maybe hacking the plugin a bit to suit our needs, it could be pressganged to provide some serious and much-needed cross-site visibility.

What do you folks think? How could it be improved? What sorts of sorting schemes would you like to see? How useful do you think these are?

Testing a site-wide posts plugin
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Attempting to fix comment preview bug

Just so everyone’s aware, I just made a small change to the comment preview plugin to wrap the comment preview in the correct CSS div class. As I made this edit within the plugin itself, it’s not going to be future proof — if we update that plugin, my change will be reverted.

The correct solution is to edit our stylesheet to honor both div classes, or change the class we use for our comments, but either of those might have ripple effects, and I was in a rush this morning so I did the least intrusive change to potentially fix the problem. Worst that can happen here is the preview is still broken.

Can you folks kindly test and let me know if it’s better now? If so, I’ll see about making a more permanent change ASAP.

Attempting to fix comment preview bug

The bug report thread

Because we don’t seem to have a general purpose one, I’m making one right now, right here.

See the new theme? It’s a bit buggy. We want to hammer everything flat and put a coat of gloss before the rest of the network is subjected to it. What do you think?

The top menu and “chiclets” (social networking icons — Facebook and RSS) need some work yet, as do some CSS bits and bobs. Also want to get a Dashboard / Log In link up there somewhere. See anything that’s just plain not working as it should? Say so now.

The bug report thread