Blog Comments

Current Version: Blog Comments 2.11

Blog Comments is a plugin for Shaun Inman’s Mint. It displays the recent comments on your blog within Mint’s beautiful interface. Blog Comments was inspired by the Who’s Talking Pepper and is powered by the open-source SimplePie PHP RSS parser.

Screenshot

Blog Comments 2.0

Minimum Requirements

In order to use Blog Comments your blog must use one of the following generators and meet the requirements for that generator. If you use a blog generator that isn’t listed and it has the ability to output a comments RSS feed, contact me and I will add support for it.

WordPress
Must be using WordPress 2.0 or greater.

Textpattern
The ajw-comments-feed plugin must be installed.

Movable Type
Must have a comments RSS page created using my RSS template.

Typo
No Minimum Requirements

ExpressionEngine
Must have a comments RSS page created using Jenny’s RSS template.

Custom Created RSS Feeds
RSS title field must be in the following format: Comment on [post title] by [author].
RSS description must contain the comment’s contents.
Note: To use a custom created RSS feed, you must input your full RSS URL into the Blog URL settings box.

Download Blog Comments

Current Version: 2.11
Released: 2008-05-25
Compatible With Mint 2.0+

Download Blog Comments 2.11

Note: If you’re updating Blog Comments to version 1.1 or later, you may delete rss_cache.inc, rss_fetch.inc, rss_parse.inc, rss_utils.inc, and the extlib folder from Blog Comments’ directory on your server.

Still have Mint 1.1? Download Blog Comments 1.13, the last version compatible with Mint 1.1.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Why isn’t my comment list filled to my Mint’s row maximum?
A: Certain blog generators only output a small number of comments in their comments RSS feed. Blog generator which are known to do this are:

  • WordPress
  • Movable Type
  • Typo

Luckily, just about all blog generators can be configured to output more comments in their RSS feed. For information on how to set this setting visit your generator’s website.

116 Comments

  1. 1 cristinamarie on Mar 21, 2006 at 6:14 pm (Quote):

    Does it work with the free version of Wordpress?

  2. 2 cavemonkey50 on Mar 21, 2006 at 7:20 pm (Quote):

    Yes, it works perfectly fine with all versions of WordPress, including WordPress.com.

  3. 3 DJ Webb on Mar 22, 2006 at 3:43 am (Quote):

    Awesome. The new custom RSS works perfectly. All I need now is people to leave messages on my message board.

  4. 4 Rothlis on Mar 22, 2006 at 11:12 am (Quote):

    Great pepper! However, it has one bug for WordPress 1.5.2, it doesn’t parse correctly the name. I looked up and I found the problem. I changed ” $author = substr(strstr($item['title'], “by “),3); ” for ” $author = substr(strstr($item['title'], “by: “),3); “.

    So, I just added a : after by, then it worked perfectly !

    Thanks again

    Rothlis

  5. 5 cavemonkey50 on Mar 22, 2006 at 11:21 am (Quote):

    Rothlis: Great pepper! However, it has one bug for WordPress 1.5.2, it doesn’t parse correctly the name. I looked up and I found the problem. I changed $author = substr(strstr($item['title'], “by “),3); for $author = substr(strstr($item['title'], “by: “),3);.

    So, I just added a after , then it worked perfectly !

    Thanks again

    Rothlis

    Yeah, I’m well aware that it doesn’t work on versions prior to 2.0. That’s why the minimum requirements for WordPress is WordPress 2.0. I could easy add support for WordPress 1.5.x, but I’d prefer to “force” people to upgrade. There have been some significant security flaws found with WordPress that have been fixed in the latest version, so it’s a good idea to update.

  6. 6 Rothlis on Mar 22, 2006 at 11:28 am (Quote):

    I understand :)

    Anyway, I’m switching to v.2.0 soon.

  7. 7 Christopher Fahey on Mar 23, 2006 at 3:00 pm (Quote):

    Your download link produces (for me, a humble Windows user) a ZIP file with nothing but blank folders and Mac resource fork files in it. Can you look into that? Thanks!

  8. 8 Christopher Fahey on Mar 23, 2006 at 3:04 pm (Quote):

    Um, forget it, I got it to unzip… It works, but seriously those Mac resource files do choke on Windows built-in ZIP app. They’re invisible to you, but we see em! :-)

  9. 9 cavemonkey50 on Mar 23, 2006 at 3:06 pm (Quote):

    Sorry about that. I will be removing them in a minute.

    Edit: Mac files removed.

  10. 10 jyoseph on Mar 26, 2006 at 2:41 am (Quote):

    Wow, this is really great! Now there is no need to login to MT in order to check comments!

    One quick question, I have 3 blogs all on the same domain, a regular blog, a photoblog etc. Is there a way that I can include the comments from any of these blogs?

    I’m guessing this is something I can do on a feed level?

  11. 11 jyoseph on Mar 26, 2006 at 3:33 am (Quote):

    Actually I found a way to do it using the Global Entries Plugin
    http://www.nonplus.net/software/mt/GlobalListings.htm

    I supplemented the MTComments tag with the Global Entries equivelant: MTGlobalComments lastn=”40″

    Good stuff, thank you very much!

  12. 12 cavemonkey50 on Mar 26, 2006 at 11:21 am (Quote):

    jyoseph: Actually I found a way to do it using the Global Entries Plugin
    http://www.nonplus.net/software/mt/GlobalListings.htm

    I supplemented the MTComments tag with the Global Entries equivelant: MTGlobalComments lastn=”40″

    Good stuff, thank you very much!

    Glad you found something that works for you. I’ll keep this in mind incase anyone else wants to do this.

  13. 13 eric on Apr 4, 2006 at 7:26 pm (Quote):

    I’m running Textpattern 4.0.3 with the proper comment rss plugin, and the pepper _works_ it’s just that every comment is from ‘just now’ all the time. Any idea what’s up?

  14. 14 cavemonkey50 on Apr 4, 2006 at 7:36 pm (Quote):

    eric, I’m aware of that. Unfortunately, it’s a glitch with Textpattern. The time attached to each comment is the current time instead of the time the comment was made. You’ll have to contact the author of the Textpattern plugin for the bug-fix.

  15. 15 eric on Apr 4, 2006 at 11:04 pm (Quote):

    Okay, thanks! That makes sense - might want to drop that in the FAQ. In the meantime, I’ll see what I can do to tweak the plugin myself.

  16. 16 Ralph on Apr 12, 2006 at 4:46 am (Quote):

    I love the Blog Comments pepper and use it with WordPress 2.0.1. I noticed a bug though, where the pepper doesn’t show (German) special chars like ÄÃ

  17. 17 cavemonkey50 on Apr 13, 2006 at 9:04 pm (Quote):

    Ralph, I’m looking into the issue. I know what’s causing it, it’s just a matter of finding a viable solution.

  18. 18 Rob Buckley on May 13, 2006 at 5:17 pm (Quote):

    The Movable Type template needs to be amended. At the moment, the puts the comments in ascending date order so the latest comments are omitted in favour of earlier comments. If you add the following attribute, the latest comments will appear first: sort_order=”descending”

  19. 19 cavemonkey50 on May 13, 2006 at 11:02 pm (Quote):

    Rob Buckley, that for the info. I’m doing that right now. The new file should be up on my site in a few minutes.

  20. 20 cavemonkey50 on May 13, 2006 at 11:06 pm (Quote):

    Alright, check out the new template. I hope I did it right.

  21. 21 eric on May 17, 2006 at 12:57 pm (Quote):

    With the latest Mint 1.29 update, recent comments with textpattern are from ‘around 37 years ago’. Time flies!

  22. 22 cavemonkey50 on May 17, 2006 at 1:08 pm (Quote):

    You’re the second person to report this to me. Was there a TextPattern update recently? Your feed no longer has the date information, just like the other person. Mint has no way of altering your comment feed, so I have no clue how this is happening. I’ll keep on looking into this issue.

  23. 23 Brian on May 20, 2006 at 8:43 pm (Quote):

    Post a comment

  24. 24 cavemonkey50 on May 20, 2006 at 10:35 pm (Quote):

    Umm, ok.

  25. 25 Bryan Buchs on Jun 20, 2006 at 11:27 am (Quote):

    Thought I’d post a handy little mod I’m using with Blog Comments for MT. Rather than link to the publised comment from the Mint interface, it made more sense for me to link directly to the MT interface (so, for instance, I could delete comment spam when neccessary). I replaced the node of the XML file with this:

    [code in next comment]

    … which opens the comment for editing/deletion.

  26. 26 Bryan Buchs on Jun 20, 2006 at 11:29 am (Quote):

    whoops - forgot to escape the code:

    < $MTCGIPath$>/mt.cgi?__mode=view&_type=comment&id=< $MTCommentID$>&blog_id=< $MTBlogID$>

  27. 27 Bryan Buchs on Jun 20, 2006 at 11:29 am (Quote):

    Sorry - one last time. (Preview?)

    <link><$MTCGIPath$>/mt.cgi?__mode=view&_type=comment&id=<$MTCommentID$>&blog_id=<$MTBlogID$></link>

  28. 28 cavemonkey50 on Jun 20, 2006 at 11:33 am (Quote):

    I fixed the second comment. I have a plugin installed that escapes the code when using the <code> tag.

  29. 29 Mark on Jul 1, 2006 at 5:28 pm (Quote):

    Does this require using “Mint” or can it work as a standalone plugin for wordpress?

  30. 30 cavemonkey50 on Jul 2, 2006 at 1:52 am (Quote):

    Mark: Does this require using “Mint” or can it work as a standalone plugin for wordpress?

    Sorry Mark, to use Blog Comments you need Mint.

  31. 31 GreekGoddess on Jul 7, 2006 at 6:02 pm (Quote):

    I am using it with a custom RSS feed and everything works fine except one thing. I get the “around 37 years ago” too like that person who used textpattern. I am using Expression Engine and my comments feed is http://www.greekgoddessjen.com/blog/cfeed

  32. 32 cavemonkey50 on Jul 7, 2006 at 10:39 pm (Quote):

    GreekGoddess: I am using it with a custom RSS feed and everything works fine except one thing. I get the “around 37 years ago” too like that person who used textpattern. I am using Expression Engine and my comments feed is http://www.greekgoddessjen.com/blog/cfeed

    I see the problem. Your date is stored in a different RSS tag than what the RSS fetcher is looking for.

    I will be releasing a new version sometime in the next week which will address this problem. I’m switching to a different PHP RSS library with better localization support, and hopefully it will support more time formats. So, just keep an eye out for the new version.

  33. 33 GreekGoddess on Jul 7, 2006 at 11:06 pm (Quote):

    thanks so much for the reply.. I’ll be looking out for the new version :)

  34. 34 Bakkel on Jul 14, 2006 at 2:17 pm (Quote):

    Works like a charme! Thanks again!

  35. 35 eric on Jul 15, 2006 at 2:25 pm (Quote):

    The new version’s dates seem to work on Textpattern when using atom feeds!

  36. 36 cavemonkey50 on Jul 15, 2006 at 3:23 pm (Quote):

    Glad it’s working for you eric.

  37. 37 Aaron on Jul 16, 2006 at 6:16 pm (Quote):

    This is what I get

    Error: Generic Parsing Error

    Any Ideas?

  38. 38 cavemonkey50 on Jul 16, 2006 at 6:23 pm (Quote):

    Aaron, something is screwed up with your WordPress install. Blog Comments is trying to read your WordPress feed, which at the moment is very broken. Take a look for yourself: http://dontmsgme.net/?feed=rss2&withcomments=1

    Once you get that fixed, Blog Comments should start working for you.

  39. 39 Aaron on Jul 16, 2006 at 6:25 pm (Quote):

    Oh whoa!
    Thank you for the heads up.

  40. 40 sean on Dec 11, 2006 at 7:22 pm (Quote):

    Any idea why I’m getting the same “Error: Generic Parsing Error” as Aaron specifies above? My installation is with MT and the mt-comments-rss template is as you’ve specified (and looks fine when I visit it directly). I had everything working until I upgraded MT and now everything’s wonky with this one Pepper. I’d appreciate any help you can offer.

  41. 41 Ronald Heft on Dec 11, 2006 at 7:29 pm (Quote):

    What’s your feed URL?

  42. 42 sean on Dec 12, 2006 at 12:00 am (Quote):

    http://saidthegramophone.com/comments-rss.xml

    thanks!

  43. 43 Ronald Heft on Dec 12, 2006 at 10:26 am (Quote):

    I did some minor testing with my install of Blog Comments. I’m getting the same error with my install, so your install is alright. Glancing over your feed, it appears like there is no issues with it, so I’m a little stumped.

    Unfortunately, I have class at the moment, and have some projects for my classes due today. I’ll be able to better diagnose the problem when I get home tonight.

  44. 44 sean on Dec 13, 2006 at 5:47 am (Quote):

    without changing anything, the bug seems to have disappeared (!). thanks for checking it out, though - and for the great plugin.

  45. 45 sean on Dec 13, 2006 at 10:55 am (Quote):

    oh, and now it’s broken again. strange.

  46. 46 Ronald Heft on Dec 13, 2006 at 1:29 pm (Quote):

    It’s currently working again. I suspect one of your comment my have an invalid character causing the feed parser to have trouble reading it.

    The generic parsing error is an error spawned from the SimplePie RSS feed parser, the parser I use to retrieve the comment feed. So, your problem lies in your feed code and SimplePie interpreting it. If the problem persists, I’ll look into SimplePie to see what’s going wrong with your feed.

    Finally, sorry for the slow responses. This is the week before finals week, and frankly I”m going a little crazy now.

  47. 47 Helmut on Jan 31, 2007 at 11:04 am (Quote):

    Hey Cavemonkey,

    nice plugin! But something in the settings doesn’t work: if i change the language on german, everything is fine. But when i get back to the preferences, i have to set the language everytime againon german! If i do not, the language is automatically english and the Pepper cant display my comments. Could you please have a look on this?

    Thanks!

  48. 48 Ronald Heft on Jan 31, 2007 at 3:52 pm (Quote):

    Checking out the issue now.

    Update: Bug squashed.

  49. 49 Helmut on Jan 31, 2007 at 4:08 pm (Quote):

    Thanks. Again, great plugin. ;)

  50. 50 Roxy Lee Ivan on Feb 5, 2007 at 2:05 pm (Quote):

    Thanks for plugin.

  51. 51 daniel on Feb 6, 2007 at 10:23 pm (Quote):

    i had the generic parsing error problem for a few weeks. transitioning to the latest mint has not helped! here’s my feed, just in case… i am on EE so i used the template provided.

    http://www.danielphillip.com/weblog/rss_comments/

  52. 52 Ronald Heft on Feb 6, 2007 at 11:11 pm (Quote):

    Your feed is working fine for me. Are you using the custom feed setting? If not, try that. If that still does not remedy your problem, are on a Unix system namely OS X? If you are, try deleting the ronaldheft folder from the Pepper directory. Then redownload the latest Blog Comments are upload that. There was a permission issue which would be corrected by following those steps.

  53. 53 daniel on Feb 6, 2007 at 11:40 pm (Quote):

    I am on OS X so I followed your suggestion. I am still receiving the same error. Anything else I could try?

    Thanks for looking into it…

  54. 54 Ronald Heft on Feb 6, 2007 at 11:43 pm (Quote):

    You’re using your full feed URL, not just the domain name, correct?

    Can you set your URL to cavemonkey50.com and turn on the WordPress generator setting? I’m wondering if you can read other feeds without issue.

  55. 55 daniel on Feb 7, 2007 at 12:07 am (Quote):

    no go with that either, same error. What are the permissions supposed to be, cause rolandheft was at 000 when i just re-uploaded… i also tried it at 755

  56. 56 daniel on Feb 7, 2007 at 12:47 am (Quote):

    sorry about the misspelling..:)

  57. 57 Ronald Heft on Feb 7, 2007 at 12:48 am (Quote):

    Folders and files should be 755.

  58. 58 daniel on Feb 7, 2007 at 1:14 am (Quote):

    okay, the files were at 644. i put those to 755 as well with no change.

  59. 59 Ronald Heft on Feb 7, 2007 at 1:29 am (Quote):

    I’ve looked into your Mint installation. I notice you have A LOT of Peppers installed. Are all of them working alright on Mint 2.x? Do any of your Peppers which fetch external data have any issues retrieving that data?

  60. 60 daniel on Feb 7, 2007 at 1:37 am (Quote):

    heheh. mint is addictive! the only trouble so far has been Local Searches which returns nothing. The other issue is that Bird Feeder kicks the Geomint pane off, and vice versa.

    I haven’t been able to get get Seeds from the Birdfeeder…

  61. 61 Ronald Heft on Feb 7, 2007 at 1:51 am (Quote):

    You’ve got mail. Reply to me from there. Once we have a fix I’ll post it back here for others’ reference.

  62. 62 Ronald Heft on Feb 7, 2007 at 2:14 am (Quote):

    The issue was found to be an incompatibility between the latest version of SimplePie and his server configuration. Using an older version of SimplePie corrected the issue. Should this happen to anyone else, let me know and I’ll hook you up with the file needed to resolve the issue.

  63. 63 Jake Good on Feb 8, 2007 at 11:42 am (Quote):

    BTW, it works perfectly with out of the box Mephisto… You have to use the “Custom” section, and input the comments feed url… but the comment feed is in the right format.

  64. 64 Ryan Gardner on Feb 15, 2007 at 10:56 pm (Quote):

    I just installed this on a Textpattern blog, but I keep getting “Error: Generic Parsing Error”

    I have the ajw-comments-feed plugin installed and it seems to be working, but still no dice. I’m just certain that it’s something simple I’m overlooking, but I can’t seem to find it.

    The site is http://www.smithforpresident.com/blog

  65. 65 Ronald Heft on Feb 16, 2007 at 1:34 am (Quote):

    I’m sending you an email.

  66. 66 Michael DiStefano on Feb 18, 2007 at 7:18 pm (Quote):

    I was getting the generic parser error as some people did above. After reading the comments I realized that I had to put in my comment feed url instead of my blog’s url.

    You might want to change the instructions on the preference page as right now it reads “Enter the URL to access your blog’s index page.”

    Thanks!

  67. 67 Ronald Heft on Feb 18, 2007 at 11:28 pm (Quote):

    Michael, are you using a custom feed? If so, that’s the only one where you would have to enter the full comments URL.

  68. 68 Alexera on Feb 19, 2007 at 6:39 pm (Quote):

    how can i get this working with mephisto?

    info@alexera.hu
    info at alexera.hu

  69. 69 Ronald Heft on Feb 19, 2007 at 6:44 pm (Quote):

    Does it have a comments feed? If so, provide me a URL and I’ll integrate it.

  70. 70 Crimson on Feb 25, 2007 at 3:26 pm (Quote):

    Ronald, your link to “Jenny’s RSS Template” for ExpressionEngine seems to be dead. Any chance of getting that fixed up?

    Thanks for this great pepper, by the way!

  71. 71 Ronald Heft on Feb 25, 2007 at 6:38 pm (Quote):

    Fixed now.

  72. 72 Crimson on Feb 26, 2007 at 2:56 am (Quote):

    Thanks, Ronald! Everything is working great now. :D

  73. 73 Mike on Mar 12, 2007 at 11:54 am (Quote):

    This is exactly what I’ve been looking for. Thanks!

  74. 74 Body on Apr 1, 2007 at 10:12 am (Quote):

    Thanks!
    I’ve ditched blogger and am about to start a wordpress blog. This little fella is just what I wanted

  75. 75 Pat on Apr 9, 2007 at 11:58 am (Quote):

    Does it work with Feedburner? After I uploaded the folder I couldn’t install blogcomments.

  76. 76 Ronald Heft on Apr 9, 2007 at 12:27 pm (Quote):

    It will work with Feedburner if you did not use the Feedburner WordPress plugin. If you did, use the custom generator option and input your Feedburner comments feed.

  77. 77 Pat on Apr 9, 2007 at 1:48 pm (Quote):

    Thanks for the quick reply!
    But I wonder why I don’t even see the Install-Button after uploading which worked fine when installing other peppers.

  78. 78 Pat on Apr 9, 2007 at 2:04 pm (Quote):

    Oh, wrong rights. Fixed. Thanks for the pepper!

  79. 79 Ronald Heft on Apr 9, 2007 at 2:16 pm (Quote):

    Pat, the permissions were set wrong? What version did you download? I thought I knocked that issue out awhile ago.

  80. 80 Pat on Apr 9, 2007 at 2:44 pm (Quote):

    It was version 2.01. I also downloaded trends and had to reset permissions.

  81. 81 Jauhari on Apr 26, 2007 at 2:48 am (Quote):

    Why error on my MINT? I have error like this

    Error: Generic Parsing Error

    What’s wrong?
    I used WordPress 2.1.3

    Thanks

  82. 82 Ronald Heft on Apr 26, 2007 at 12:13 pm (Quote):

    The problem is your feed. Feedburner is reporting an error in your comments feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/jauhari/comments

  83. 83 Traume on May 13, 2007 at 11:20 pm (Quote):

    Thank you for the plugin!

  84. 84 Natola on May 25, 2007 at 7:02 pm (Quote):

    very good and needed plugin :)

  85. 85 nick on May 30, 2007 at 10:16 am (Quote):

    Hey, I get this message: Error: Blog URL not configured.

    Do you have any idea why?

  86. 86 Ronald Heft on May 30, 2007 at 3:23 pm (Quote):

    nick, go into Mint’s preferences, click the Blog Comments setting tab, and verify you have a URL in the Blog URL field. If there is a URL, make sure you click Done when exiting and do not just navigate away from the page. If you navigate away without clicking Done, your Blog URL will not be saved in the database.

  87. 87 nick on Jun 1, 2007 at 7:12 am (Quote):

    Thanks for the help everything work ok for a day then I got this: Error: Generic Parsing Error.

    I could be wrong but I don’t see anything wrong with the feed.

  88. 88 Ronald Heft on Jun 1, 2007 at 3:48 pm (Quote):

    nick, something is definitely wrong with your comments feed. It’s throwing all sorts of errors. http://tcramerica.org/?feed=rss2&withcomments=1

  89. 89 nick on Jun 1, 2007 at 4:41 pm (Quote):

    ah crap, thanks. Now I have to figure this out.

  90. 90 Ronald Heft on Jul 1, 2007 at 12:24 pm (Quote):

    Here is the download link to the latest version. New versions can be downloaded in Mint’s Peppermill.

  91. 91 Mike on Aug 17, 2007 at 10:57 am (Quote):

    It’s very beautifully.

  92. 92 sopitikoj on Sep 7, 2007 at 8:51 pm (Quote):

    Hello

    Real nice! I found lots of intresting things here. I will bookmark!

    Bye