Recent Comments Widget
The “Recent Comments” feed in the left sidebar seems rather flaky and frequently goes down. If it’s facilitating discussion and making people more interested in engaging the comments, I’m willing to invest in getting that fixed. If not, I’m inclined to scrap it.
How many of you pay any attention to it and find it useful (when it’s working, that is)?
I use it, and I’m also willing to invest (time) in getting it fixed if it is a code problem.
I’d never use it as a referance.
If you see the first 20 (?) letters of someone’s comment, you have no idea what thread they are in, so you’d have to look at the last 4-5 blog-posts to respond. It’s not like you know where the post the comment is in.
If you hold your mouse over the poster’s name, a tooltip will pop up with the thread’s title.
I noticed it’s there, but I’ve never noticed there was a problem with it. Which shows how much attention I (don’t) pay to it, I suppose.
Never noticed it till yesterday, & can’t see it being useful to me.
I’ve been reading this blog pretty much daily for the last 2 + yrs or so and I’ve never noticed it.
I had numerous requests a while back to add the feature on my site. People seem to like to know where the most recent comments are located so they don’t have to search for them….
I’ve noticed it but never used it.
I never noticed it here. I have seen it on other blogs, but never really used it on those blogs.
I liked referencing it sometimes. I doubt the code would be really hard to update, but it might speed up the blog ever so slightly if you dropped the box altogether.
James,
I see that the recent comments widget is still there, but still not working. Again, if it’s a code issues (bug or performance), I would be happy to help improve it. It seems to me to be a simple query and some HTML, it shouldn’t be hard to make it work, and work well. Perhaps Mark can give me some information as to the actual problem.