Brandon Fuller

Radio Userland and Personal Comment Services

I became unsatisfied with Radio’s built-in comment service because of 3 main things:

1. The servers where down or unreachable from time to time which makes my pages script out
2. You cannot get notification when somebody posts a post
3. You cannot delete posts (move, edit, etc)

So I decided to look for another alternative.  I did find a list of many different services out there that you could use.  But everybody wanted to be paid yearly for those and seemed to all be at capacity or not accepting sign-ups.  I have my own server.  I would rather use it.

I looked through the scripts that were out there and decided to start with remotedotcomments as a baseline.  My goal was to integrate this into Radio so that it becomes a Radio compatiable service and you do not need to change any of your templates to use it.  Therefore, it will be very seemless.  I had to end up changing the structure a bit and changing it to work with Radio’s URL strings but I got it.  This services use PHP as its engine so if you don’t have PHP, you are out of luck with my version.  If you want to host and run your own comments service, here is how to do it.

1. Create a /comments directory in Radio under the www directory.
2. Create a #prefs.txt file in there and put the single directive in it #flRender false
3. Download this .zip file and open it.  Save the .php file into your newly created comments directory
4. You can customize some items at the top of the .php file as you see fit.   Put your e-mail address in there to get notifications.
5. Telnet up to your web server that your site runs on.  Inside of the comments directory from step #1, create a data directory.  Inside the data directory create directories with the number of your Radio Userland user ID.  So you should have something like /comments/data/123456.  Make sure that the final directory has 777 permissions.
6. In Radio Userland, under Prefs, go to the Comments section and change the server name to <your server>/comments/comments.php
7. Republish your web site

Obviously, you will lose all your old comments.  I didn’t have that many so writing any type of migration wasn’t interesting to me.

I am currently moderating the comments just by telneting onto my server and editing as needed for now.  An admin UI would be helpful eventually.