This post marks 4 in one day. Whew!

Resig and I were bouncing ideas around after I made the form filler, and we came up with something that fits very nicely into the jQuery api (in the form of something very pluggable).

You'll need the following code that will extend jQuery's functionality. Basically, it adds 'saveAsCookie' and 'loadAsCookie' function calls to $() objects.

$.fn.saveAsCookie = function(n,t){
   return this.each(function(){
     createCookie( (n || '') + (this.name || this.id), this.value, t );
   });
 };

$.fn.loadAsCookie = function(n){
  return this.each(function(){
    this.value = readCookie( (n || '') + (this.name || this.id) );
  });
};

You can safely put that code somewhere and load it anywhere you need autofill. Reusable code is awesome.

Now, we don't want to cache *all* input elements, becuase only some contain user-input and only some need to be saved. For this, I put the class 'cookieme' on all input elements I wanted to save.

 $(document).ready(function(){
   $("form#comments_form").submit(function(){
     $("input.cookieme",this).saveAsCookie("formdata");
   })
   .find("input.cookieme").loadAsCookie("formdata");
 });

The arguments to 'saveAsCookie' and 'loadAsCookie' are namespace prefixes. This way, you can avoid namespace collisions with other cookies. All of my autofill cookies will be prefixed with 'formdata' and suffixed with the element name or id attribute.

So, we squished the code down to 6 lines, 4 of which are actually meaningful.

jQuery++

It's always nice when websites you commonly visit remember things about you, or atleast give the perception that they remember things about you.

The Pyblosxom comment plugin doesn't autofill the form. That's too bad. I don't really want to dig into the python code to do any cookie-setting on submission, becuase I have never looked at the code and thusly am unfamiliar with the effort required for such a change. Luckily, we can use javascript to store data in cookies too!

I love jQuery, so that's what I'll use for this little hack. On the comments page, I add the following javascript:

   var uname = "u.name";
   var uemail = "u.email";
   var usite = "u.site";

   function saveCommentInformation() {
      // Save user information from the form!
      createCookie(uname, $("input[@name='author']").val());
      createCookie(uemail, $("input[@name='email']").val());
      createCookie(usite, $("input[@name='url']").val());
   }

   function initCommentForm() {
      // Autofill user information if available
      $("input[@name='author']").val(readCookie(uname));
      $("input[@name='email']").val(readCookie(uemail));
      $("input[@name='url']").val(readCookie(usite));

      // Save comment information when form is submitted
      $("form[@name='comments_form']").submit(saveCommentInformation);
   }

   $(document).ready(initCommentForm);

That's all we need. Whenever someone submits, we will store useful information in a cookie. Whenever that person comes back, we'll pull the data out of the cookie and put it back in the form. User Experience is happier, atleast as far as I am concerned (as a user).

If you are wondering about the 'readCookie' and 'createCookie' functions, you can find them on quirksmode.org:

http://www.quirksmode.org/js/cookies.html

Subject says it all. I've really wanted comments working in pyblosxom 1.3 for quite some time. However, all googling points to old versions of the comments plugin that only works on the older versions. I checked the pyblosxom page tonight and was pleasantly surprised that a contributed plugin set had been released early this month.

If you use pyblosxom 1.3.x, plugin updates are ready for your use.

On that note, comment functionality is FINALLY here on this site. To those of you reading this site, feel free to comment! I love feedback.

Go to the pyblosxom website