Sounds cool to me Chris. I like the idea. I just hope it doesn’t cause people to spam your comments just to get a differently styled comment.

Shawn,
Heh, I hadn’t thought of that.

The nice thing is that with the way it is now, I have to make the decision to add you. Spamming would only be a problem with the version based on number of comments.

Still something to think about.

Oh, ok, I gotcha. Thanks for updating with that link where the coloring is going on. I like how you are using colors to also match that persons blog colors. Nice touch. That will also aid in helping you remember who’s site is who’s. This in combination with gravatars is a neat idea.

Clever, of course. I like it if for no other reason than the fact that I see you took the care to be selective with the colors, evidenced by Hanni being pink. Cute.

I actually find it a bit distracting on a post with many comments. So many colors, what do they all mean!?! I like your idea of basing the color off of the number of comments. You could have a normal background color (gray) and a hilite color (light blue for instance) and have ten gradations between those two, so that rare posters are gray or almost gray and constant posters are light blue or almost light blue (and keep white for yourself). That would at least give some consistency and meaning to the coloring while not bumming out those that you didn’t pick to get hilited.

Tom,

Thanks those are excellent thoughts on this, and I will definately keep them in mind while writing the alternate version of this plugin.

Great work once again Chris. I like the individuality that features such as this add to the comments. It’s kind of a nice reward for your regular visitors.

Now, this is indeed a cool thing. You’re always thinking differently. Must be that Mac. Anyways, the implementation looks really cool. Kudos to you, man.

I would put this down to a ‘random act of sillyness’ (sillyness spelt wrong intentionally). *cough cough*

Seriously though, interesting concept, but I think it confuses rather than adds to the design. I would expect your comments to stand out from the others, but they wouldn’t anymore with this plugin.

Well, you can make your comment stand out by some other methods, like a mouseover bg change, or something else. It adds more vibrancy to the design.

I seem to agree with the others that it might actually distract more than enhance. Maybe if your comments are one color, special people are all another color and everyone else is plain. So the regulars all have one color, and you can track their conversation apart from the regular commenters if you want.

That’s cool; I’ve been wanting to implement this for a while; Share a link gov’?

Maybe the colour variation is a bit big, but it’s a cool variation nonetheless.

Also, it would be nice to have two versions (or maybe a ‘switch’) to have people choose their poison (post count vs. certain individuals). Just so many will be pleased.]

Oh, and I’m glad I have this wicked styling :) Wrap this up and I might have something cool for my redesign, besides the fact that it is totally different.

When can we expect a link, King?

Hey everyone,

I hope to have something for you by the end of this week. My main problem is that currently you have to add } else { if statements to the plugin for each person you add a color for.

That is not very user friendly. So I am trying to find a good way of connecting this up with an admin screen that will allow you to easily add users to the array.

Back to work!

I am pleased to be styled differently. Cool idea, too — - and not at all distracting to me.

I’d like to talk to you about your /wp-content/themes/freshandclean/comment.css, which powers the visual improvement of this beta-plugin. You could really clean that up, in terms of removing about 20 lines of code.

li.author {
padding: 30px 20px 8px 20px;
background-color: #F8F4F6;
border: 1px solid #bbb;
}li.binary {
padding: 30px 20px 8px 20px;
background-color: #C4EDF9;
border: 0px solid #bbb;
}li.hex {
padding: 30px 20px 8px 20px;
background-color: #C9D2AB;
border: 0px solid #bbb;
}[…]

Notice how padding: and border: always have the same stuff applied. You could reduce this file’s size simply by doing something like this:

li.special-comment {
padding: 30px 20px 8px 20px;
border: 0px solid #bbb;
}li.author {
background-color: #f8f4f6;
}li.binary {
background-color: #c4edf9;
}li.hex {
background-color: #c9d2ab;
}

…and so on, and so on.

You would have to make some tiny adjustments to your plugin then, to make it output things like <li class="special-comment author"> instead of <li class="author">.

Very cool idea and I like it a lot. You definately have an awesome site.

Shiny. Shiny is good. :)

I like it — gives your blog even more personality.

Mmm been too long since I’ve seen what plugins you have made. I’ll have to check back soon and make a change to my layout and plugin structure. Keep up the good work Chris!

This, is in deed a very nice stuff. The destracting argumet doesn’t really stand I think and it brings some life in usually quite sad websites.