“Only two lines of javascript and what a difference it makes!” That was my conclusion after trying out NicEdit on my personal blog - a script that puts RichText WYSIWYG functionality into a blog’s comment section.
As any blogger will tell you, the comments section of the blog is pretty much the life-blood of the site. The blog community revolves around the comments section. Discussions, arguments and relationships revolve around the comments section. Spammers go wild in the comments section! I spend a good part of my day in the comment moderation section of Make Use Of making sure everyone behaves themselves and that the Viagra & male organ enhancement salesmen take their business elsewhere.
I have tried lots of things to jazz up my comments section on my blog (I’ll be discussing another one in my next post) but I particularly liked NicEdit because of its simplicity. As I said, it’s just two lines of javascript and you just have to copy and paste it ANYWHERE in the comments page of the HTML template of your blog. Save the whole thing then go to one of your blog pages and check out the comments. You’ll now see that the comments form has a RichText WYSIWYG functionality.
This is what my comments box looked like before NicEdit was installed :
Functional and straight-forward but rather boring right?
Now here’s what it looked like AFTER NicEdit was installed.
Suddenly you can offer your commenters a wide variety of fonts, font sizes, formats….they can even insert photos and links! Not bad for free!
So why not add this to your blog (seems to work on all blogging platforms) and next time I’ll tell you about a Wordpress plugin that I found which also has the potential to personalize and liven up a boring blog comment!
(By) Mark O’Neill is a blogger, professional freelance writer and the editor of Make Use Of. Check out his personal blog at BetterThanTherapy.net
Filed Under: Cool Websites
Tags: blogging tools, javascript
That is a nice little script.
One concern though: if you simply insert the 2 lines of code, it will load the content from the NicEdit site since the script is hosted there. If the NicEdit site is down, it will affect the display on your comment box.
A better way is to download the script and install it in your server.
I second Damien, if Nicedit server goes down it will affect your blog as well. We had similar issue with Mofuse. A while ago Mofuse had some tech issue and made MUO inaccessible for about an hour. Everything went back to normal once we dsiabled it.
Nice!
That’s great, thanks Mark!
That’s a nice little feature but I wonder what the resource footprint of an HTML editor like NicEdit (which’ll be rendered in every blog page that has a comments section) is. I definitely like the hyperlink feature so users can prettify longer links that run out of the comments section container.
And doesn’t work in IE - and guest cannot use some formatting options in WP…
[...] my last article, I talked about how you can use NicEdit to add RichText WYSIWYG functionality to your blog comments. Well today I want to talk about a [...]
I was looking for a rich text editor script I could install via Greasemonkey or Mozilla add-ons to use it on Livejournal and some other blogs that have just simple Textarea…anyone knowing or such?
NiceEdit isn’t of a help here…:/