Pure CSS3 comment bubbles for Blogger

A week ago or so I implemented the comment bubbles for this blog. There are some comment bubble hacks for Blogger that use image, but I found none with CSS3 bubbles, so that is what I started from. I show in this article, how you can make CSS3 comment bubbles like this for Blogger.

"Pure" in this context means that I don't use images. I really don't know much CSS so I don't know if the product-dependent -webkit-, -moz- and -o- style settings are "pure CSS3" or not.

Browsers like Firefox, Opera and Chome already support CSS3, and soon also Internet Explorer will, so you might already want to have this clean CSS only solution in your blog. It also loads a bit quicker without external images that cause http request. This CSS solution degrades to quite nice looking and usable element on Internet Explorers (version 9 and below), too, see the end of this article.

Because CSS3 is not fully supported by Internet Explorer versions below 10, in this blog I expanded this CSS only solution to use image in IE8 and below, and CSS + gradient data URI in IE9. So this CSS only hack is not installed in this blog. I'll tell you about "pure image comment bubbles" and the combined solution in later articles.

Add comment count code

First we add the link to "post.url#comments" next to the post title, where link's text is the number of comments in that post. Open your template html, and expand widget templates. Find lines:

<b:includable id='post' var='post'>
  <div class='post hentry'>
    <a expr:name='data:post.id'/>
    <b:if cond='data:post.title'>
      <h3 class='post-title entry-title'>

After those lines add (doubleclick to select for copying):

<b:if cond='data:post.allowComments'><a class='comment-bubble' expr:href='data:post.url + &quot;#comments&quot;' expr:title='&quot;Comments to &amp;quot;&quot; + data:post.title + &quot;&amp;quot;&quot;'><data:post.numComments/></a></b:if>

Save the template.

Add CSS for comment bubbles

I chose the colors for my bubbles like this, you might want to use some other colors that suit your template:

Go to Template designer, choose Advanced, Add CSS. Add the following CSS:

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Apply to blog. And you have your CSS comment bubbles!

This hack and Internet Explorer

In IE7 and below the bubble is only a rectangle with borders and solid background color.
In IE8 the comment bubble has solid background color and no rounded borders.
IE9 does quite well, only the gradient background is missing (background is solid color).

Gradient PNG data URI maker reference

As I mentioned when I posted the new version of my AppEngine application, I also added a new feature to the application. When I was implementing the comment bubbles, I learned about data URIs (or data: URIs). Data URI is a Uniform Resource Identifier. URLs are URIs, too, only data URIs do not contain address to the data, but instead the data itself. For example, small images! Data URIs are supported by all major browsers and by Internet Explorer version 8 and higher.

Read more, blog article: Data URIs explained.
Convert any data to data URI: The data: URI kitchen.

I implemented the button gradient for IE9 using gradient PNG data URI. I made the PNG with GIMP, saved without any extra data, run "base64 gradient.png", added "data:image/png;base64," in front of the output and there was my data URI for CSS. Still, quite a lot of work, for example if you change colors, you have to do this all over again. I tried to find a tool to automate this, but did not find, so I implemented it in my Google AppEngine application.

The gradient tool uses url parameters, although I have also made a front end tool for it. Url parameters work like this:

http://avafavico.appspot.com/?c1=C1C1C1&c2=C2C2C2&h=H&w=W

C1C1C1 is top color (or left color in horizontal gradient), 000000-FFFFFF
C2C2C2 is bottom color (or right color in horizontal gradient), 000000-FFFFFF
H is gradient image height, integer 1-4096
W is gradient image width, integer 1-4096

Example: http://avafavico.appspot.com/?c1=ff0000&c2=0000ff&h=10&w=30
Gradient:
Data URI: data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAB4AAAAKCAYAAACjd+4vAAAABHNCSVQICAgIfAhkiAAAACVJREFUOI1j/M/A8P8HAyfDdwYOBnrSTAwDBEYtHrV41OKhbzEAzUMfE4HBrHkAAAAASUVORK5CYII=

Usually either H or W is 1 to optimize png size, and image is repeated to make it fill the whole background of an element, in the example h=10 so the image can be seen better, but in production version you would use h=1. H x W cannot be more than 4096, but this should be sufficient.

You don't and cannot embed the call to gradient tool into your template or page. Instead, you use the tool, get the data URI and put that in your template/page.

→ Easy to use front end for gradient tool ←

My Google App Engine Python application evolved

Couple of weeks ago I made my first Google App Engine application, using a new language for me, Python. It is made to fetch Blogger user avatars using Blogger userID. It worked/works ok, but I did some improvements to code, some structuring and formatting, generalized tag searching from html, etc.

Yesterday, as a deviation of making the comment bubbles, I added a completely new function to that application: a tool to make gradient PNG data URIs, which can be used in CSS, for example. The avatar part of the application functions just like before. I will tell you more about the gradient PNG data URI tool later in another article, and the comment bubbles, too, but here's the revised code (in my versioning it is version number 4):

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Again, if you have any ideas for the code, please comment. There was a minor html bug (which did not affect functionality) in the previous version, also one "None" comparison made with "==", unnecessary parenthesis, etc, and nobody told me! :)

Updates:
2011 Dec 14th, v4.01: Load also the new default icon from "www.blogger.com"
2011 Dec 18th, v4.02: Increased timeout from 5 to 15 in loading blogger profile pages, also handle download errors.
2012 March 14th, newest version 5 here.

Welcome to YABTB

Welcome to my Blogger tips and hacks blog. This is a real sticky post, without date hassling. Learn how you can make real sticky posts in your Blogspot blog. See also these hacks and tips of interest:

Real Sticky posts for Blogger

Sticky post(s) can be useful in a blog, as a featured post, as a notification of an upcoming event, some general info about blog, etc. Again, Wordpress, from where I migrated to Blogger, has this feature. And Blogger does not.

There has been two "hacks" around, until now, to make kind of sticky posts in Blogger, but both have big problems. But maybe one of them suits you, so I'll tell you about these shortly.

Date hack - not good

Publish your post. Edit the post after publishing, under Post Options set post date to somewhere in the future (for example year 2020). Now this post will be the first post in your blog, until 2020 or until you edit the date.

Problem: Messes blog's RSS feed. Your sticky post will be the latest post in the feed until 2020, and so people won't see updates from your blog in services that use RSS. This is bad.
Problem: Your post shows that it is published in the future. You can make code to hide the date but it gets complicated.

Gadget hack - not good

Go to Design, Page Layout, add HTML/Javascript gadget to page, and move it to just above the posts section. Don't give the gadget a title, write your sticky "post" in HTML to look as a post. One variation of this is to edit template html and put the "post" there.

Problem: It is not a post. You cannot comment it. You cannot see it in blog archives. And it does not appear in your Blog RSS feed, either. So for example, if you announce some upcoming event this way, your feed followers won't see it, unless they open your blog page.
Problem: your gadget/template html is shown on every page in your blog, unless you add some code to show it only on the first page, and this gets complicated.

Here is my gadget sticky post hack, with the latter problem solved. It may be a good solution for some blogs, so check it out, here's a demo.

Real sticky posts - excellent!

Sticky post should be a post, with normal publishing date, appearing in Blog feed. It should be easy to make a post sticky, and make a sticky post normal. Sticky posts should have a way to look different from normal posts.

My solution fulfills these requirements. Script pulls the sticky posts from the blog feed, so blog feed must be enabled in blog's settings. And also because blog feed is needed, my sticky posts hack don't unfortunately work in private blogs. You can control posts' sticky state simply by giving post a label, default is "sticky" but you can change that if you want. You can set how many sticky posts are shown at most, and if more "sticky" labels are found than this amount, then the newest posts are shown.

Installation

Edit template html. Put this code just before </body>.

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Normally posts posted in same day are grouped together in Blogger layout templates, into same div element. Because of this, if you post a sticky post and a normal post with same date, also the normal post is removed from the page when sticky post is removed and placed on top of the page. To prevent this, you may want to install a simple hack to show dates on all posts, which breaks down the "daily groups". But if you never post two posts in the same day, or edit the sticky posts' dates to be different from any other post, then it is not necessary.

Configuration

You may edit the CSS styles for stickies-container and sticky-post, and configure the following javascript variables:

stickyLabel: the label which turns a post into a sticky post
maxStickies: maximum number of posts displayed as sticky, 1-20 (don't overdo it)
showDate: show date or not, you may want to hide it
showTitle: show post title or not
showFooter: you may want to hide the whole footer
showPostedBy: show Posted By text in footer
showCommentLink: show link to comments in footer
showLabels: show post labels in footer
showStickyLabel: show also the sticky label in the labels list, or hide it
showEmailPost: show Email Post button
showShareButtons: show the sharebuttons group or not
showShareEmail: show email button in sharebuttons
showShareBlog: show blog button in sharebuttons
showShareTwitter: show twitter button in sharebuttons
showShareFacebook: show facebook button in sharebuttons
showSharePlusone: show plus one button in sharebuttons
widthPlusone: you may want to limit this, small enough and text disappears
txtComment: singular form, used in sentence "1 comment", just the text, without number
txtComments: plural form, used in sentence "# comments", just the text, without number
txtPostedBy: text in Posted by, can have variables [user] and [time]
txtLabels: text preceding the labels list
txtMore: "Read more »" text for posts with a jump break.
dynamicMore: if true, jump break text (after "more link") is revealed dynamically
txtHideMore: text of the link to hide "more text", if dynamicMore is used (true)

Using a jump break in a sticky post may be a good idea, so that the sticky post don't become too tall. With variable setting dynamicMore=true the rest of the sticky post is revealed dynamically, which looks great and is faster than a full page load.

You can move the CSS style declarations to body section of the template, if you want, and add more styles to style the sticky posts (know your way around).

Return of the Better Recent Comments gadget

Update Dec 29th 2011. You might be interested of the newer version: Son of the better recent comments gadget.
---
Just few days ago I made a javascript gadget for Blogger that displays recent comments similarly to the Recent Comments in Gadget directory, but better. Also has some extra functionality, and bugs fixed, of course.

I did not stop there, I now present the newest "Return of the Better Recent Comments". Who would not like to have recent comments like these two examples? (right one is in Finnish, from my MS-potilas blog)

Features

- all options and features that my previous version had
+
- displays either anonymous (mystery man) icon, site favicon or blogger profile icon
- you can customize "header" and "footer" and tooltip text
- your (blog author) comments can be displayed differently (CSS styling)
- more options to make this suit also bigger blogs
- I think I forgot something...

To get the blogger avatars, I had to make a Python app with Google App Engine (here is the newer, current version), because it is not possible to get them by only javascript. Blogger avatars can be turned off to make gadget run faster, site favicons will then still be used (for example, B icon for Bloggers).

Here is the code. You can put this in HTML/Javascript gadget.

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Configuration

There is some CSS at first, it can be changed to your liking. After that there comes javascript block and configurable variables. Here is a list of them and a short explanation.

numRecentComments: how many comments you want displayed
numPerPost: how many comments per post max is the goal (will fallback when necessary)
maxCommentChars: how many chars max in excerpt of comment
maxPostTitleChars: how long post title can be, or 0 (=don't cut title)
txtWrote: header text, links to comment
txtMore: footer text, links to comment
txtToolTip: text to be shown when mouse hovers over comment
txtAnonymous: "Anonymous" username localized, or empty if English text "Anonymous" is to be used
getTitles: fetch titles from post feed; if false, titles are generated from url
trueAvatars: fetch blogger avatars from profile page, not just blogger favico
urlMyAvatar: especially if trueAvatars = false, set here the url to your avatar image. A bit faster, if set.
urlMyProfile: if you don't have a profile gadget on page, put your profile url here!
urlAnoAvatar: anonymous avatar, you can change from mystery man to a custom one, if you want
maxResultsPosts: can be empty or &max-results=### where ### is number of posts to get from posts feed to get titles
maxResultsComments: empty or &max-results=### where ### is number of comments to get from comments feed

txtWrote, txtMore and txtTooltip

These can be just normal text. If txtWrote is normal text, it is preceded by commenter name. So if txtWrote is "wrote..." the result would be Jason wrote..., if Jason was commenting.

All texts can also have simple variables, which are: [title], [user], [date], [time], [datetime] and [date format]. [title] is substituted by Post title, where comment belongs. [user] is substituted by commenter name. [date] displays date in current (user's computer's) locale, [time] displays time and [datetime] date and time in user's locale.

format in [date format]

In format some character combinations are substituted:

yyyy=long year, yy=short year, MM=month(01-12), dd=monthday,
hh=hour, mm=min, ss=sec (time/hours in 24-hour clock)

but format can contain also other text/characters (which are displayed as is).

"Written [date MM/dd/yyyy hh:mm]" could become "Written 11/03/2011 08:30".

Script has good configuration defaults, so if all this was too complicated for you, you don't have to care about it. If you don't have a profile gadget on your page, put the profile url in the code I provided, and you're ready to go. If you have a profile gadget, then you don't have to change anything, just copy and paste.

As usual, the gadget is installed on this blog.

Note: If you install this on a very high traffic blog (thousands of hits per day), I suggest you to make your own Google App Engine application to get Blogger avatars (see this article), as I'm using the free version and it might get slow on heavy load. I don't know if it will, we'll see. Or if it gets slow, just turn Blogger avatars off (trueAvatars = false), or use the newer version, which does not use the App Engine application.

Problems in Internet Explorer?

By default many Blogger templates have set Internet Explorer to use EmulateIE7. IE7 emulation has some bug with blog feeds in foreign languages that can make the gadget not show properly. You can fix this by editing the template, find line:

<meta content='IE=EmulateIE7' http-equiv='X-UA-Compatible'/>

(or something similar with text "EmulateIE7"), and change it to:

<meta content='IE=EmulateIE8' http-equiv='X-UA-Compatible'/>

Update Dec 29th 2011. Newer version here: Son of the better recent comments gadget.
Update Jan 2nd 2012: Deleted comments (This post has been removed by the author.) no longer have "alternate" link in comment feeds, like they used to, which can cause the recent comments to disappear. I modified the script to prevent this: line 121 is modified and line 128 is new.

Google App Engine Python tool to get Blogger avatar

Blogger avatar, or Profile image, is hard or even impossible to get using javascript. In data feeds there is only profile page link, but not the image on that profile page.

To get the image, one should open the profile page, parse the html, find profile image url, and use/load it. This cannot be done in Javascript, because profile page is in different domain (blogger.com). So I did it with Google App Engine. That was quite a trip: completely new programming environment and I did not know much about Python, but I managed to get done what I wanted. Phew!

My profile page: http://www.blogger.com/profile/05137522196636058302
My avatar image: http://avafavico.appspot.com/?userid=05137522196636058302

You can try it on your user id (or any other's) in this post, if you like.

Blogger userid:  

I was going to use the avatar in javascript application as 16x16 picture, so I shrank the Profile pictures to 32x32 to minimize net traffic. Avafavico is just a name... First I thought it could also return favicons to urls that are not blogger profile, but then decided not to reinvent (http://www.google.com/s2/favicons?domain=) the wheel, after that the working name was BlogAva, but that domain was taken.

Here is my Python code. I don't write Python well, so any suggestions how to optimize or make the code better, are welcome! :) Thanks.

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A newer version of this Python application is here.

I've used this online application/tool in my newest recent comments gadget, which can be seen on this blog. I'll tell you another day how that is done.