I had posted about a product that was involved with assigning online reputation for bloggers and commentators online. Developed by a company called SezWho, they have plugins for WordPress and Moveable type that accumulates the online reputation of people at their servers.
I was looking for something similar for Blogspot. but have not really succeeded in finding one. MyBlogLog is not really about comments, and co.mments is more about tracking. Even the SezWho page does not have any offering for blogspot. So I thought that I could come up with something that would allow rating of people who have commented on a blog to show up on blogs hosted by blogger also.
Blogs allow users to embed scriptlets, and that is one functionality that can be used to achieve this functionality. The end result was not graphically great, but achieved the result. I could not complete it, but here is the way to do it, and I would complete it later when I can squeeze out some time.
The script basically looks for the "comments" div, digs a little deeper to find the individual comments that are defined as the element as shown in line 83. It then basically weeds out anonymous comments and sends request to a server that would return the rating of the commentators if any. The user can also rate the current comment writer and the button would perform a hidden iFrame post, after collecting the rater's unique Id (either blogger id, or the mail address). All the cros site AJAX are done using YUI. The unique id of the comment writer is available inside the tag (line 86) and is passed as a parameter. I also saw it working across a couple of different themes. All I now need is some server space and I could get this system up and running.
So far, so good, but this system does have its problems. The entire UI addition will be visible only when one blog post is seen. It is NOT visible when a user is writing comments as the javascript that we include in the page is not available. This would require a Greasemonkey script, but that is for later.
So the design is ready, all I am waiting is for someone to donate me some server space, and some time that I can squeeze out. I am not sure if this really is going to be useful, but javascript development sure is fun !!
