Firda from Wannabe girl was one of the blogs that inspired me to start my own – but now she needs YOUR support!

In the middle of the Blogathon (she was the only person I sponsored as well), her mother was taken ill and is currently in the Intensive Care Unit in their local hospital. However, due to Indonesia (where Firda lives) not having a national health service (like the UK’s own NHS: poor though it is), she has to find all the hospital bills herself – and at $300 a day (that’s £186) it’s quite expensive.

So, go and donate some money to her (via her friend’s PayPal account) – I’m sure it’ll be appreciated. I’ve done my little bit (practically clearing out all the contents of my PayPal account to her) – so why don’t you give a few dollars?

Woo! I’ve just hit the 1,000^th comment entry with:

July 28, 2003 12:37 AM: on Game: Grid Lock by Canguy

i’ve been scratching my head so long over level 40 i’m bleeding
Canguy

Ok, it’s not the most inspiring comment on the most up to date post – but it’s still the 1,000th comment (baring duplicates and spam: both of which I should have eradicated by now).

If all goes well, the following piece of code snippet:

<ol>
<MTComments firstn=”1000″ sort_order=”ascend”>
<li><span class=”comments-post”><$MTCommentDate$>: on <MTCommentEntry><a href=”<$MTEntryLink$>
“><$MTEntryTitle$></a></MTCommentEntry> by <$MTCommentAuthorLink spam_protect=”1″ show_email=”0″$></span><br /><$MTCommentBody$></li>
</MTComments>
</ol>

should mean the full entry of this post should have all 1,000 comments listed. I was hoping to be able to have cut’n'pasted the list in: but, again, I’ve hit the “maximum post size” of MovableType. Drat…

Update: Nope, it didn’t work. It seems you can’t use the template tags in an entry. Oh well, you’ll just have to look through the blog to find the comments!

Many thanks everybody for all the comments and trackbacks – and keep them coming! They make blogging worth the while!

Cool, it appears the a certain ODP editor has decided to release the Movable Type designed template he uses on his blog as open source to download and use on your own site.

I must admit, for the last few days I’ve been tempted to “borrow” his site design (as it’s quite nice looking) but at least I can do it legally now I have already purchase some other web site templates to use on various websites, but unlike Mr.T, I’m not a designer. I can manipulate the design, but I just can’t get it to “feel right” to me – it doesn’t really help with Photoshop making “fixed layout” HTML instead of the dynamic flexible type. There’s still a chance they you may find that my blog could start looking like Neil’s

Some of you may have noticed that my Blocking Free Email Domains post appeared, then reappeared as “Post deleted” and then reappeared properly – and I think an explanation is in order.

Basically, that post lists over 12,000 domain names that provide free email addresses (i.e. like Hotmail and Yahoo) but the content management system I use for my blog – MovableType – doesn’t accept posts over a certain size (no, I’m not sure what the maximum post size is: all I know is the domain name list got truncated mid-way through the “d’s”).

So how did I work around it? Basically, I uploaded the body of the post (which includes the list of domain names) into a “storage/holding/cache” area of the blog’s webspace (which also holds things like cached adverts – the mini “guess that movie” sidebar generation system etc etc) and then just used a PHP include_once command to make the list appear “inline” of the post.

However, if you do do this yourself, there is something you should be aware of. It’ll break your site’s search functionality (including the auto-highlight functionality provided by MT- Ref Search) – not a major biggie, but something you should be aware of.