Some of you may have noticed if you’re regular subscribers that I’m currently working on the Feedback In-Feed that I added a few days back: specifically, trying to make it less obtrusive. However, one of the things that I didn’t realize in all my efforts is that I almost always already *have* the user’s homepage information: if they’ve left a comment on the site, it’s stored in a cookie in their browser (which is probably what they’re going to be submitting the form through).<\/p>\n
“But”, I hear the audience crying, “You can’t see their cookies! They’re posting the form from their aggregator!”<\/p>\n
Ah, my feeble minded friends, this is true, but this is unimportant. What matters is the user agent which hits the final form – which is stored (now) in the same directory as this blog, meaning it has access to all the cookies set by this blog. Including, as it happens, the name and URL of the person, assuming they’ve left a comment here before. <\/p>\n
Of course, this has some limitations: persons who have not commented here before will not have a homepage set, or whose cookies have expired. (They expire after one year in WordPress, it seems.) Still, at the cost of saving space, I have gone the route of removing the homepage from the form, as well as pulling out some of the HTML I didn’t really like in the first place, and cleaning it up in general. I’ve been working on this over the past few days, in large part with help from jc<\/a>, who was helping me figure out ways to make controls smaller. He said that my feedback form was “Somehow even more annoying than Adsense in feeds” – something that I was loath to admit, but in the end had to agree with.<\/p>\n Since I know there are a large number of people who read this who never comment, there is also a built in “more info” link, via which users can set their Name\/URI. So, if you have any interest, feel free to use that link to set your name\/URI, which will then be stored with the data.<\/p>\n