Today I almost missed Frank's thoughtful comment regarding establishing an International Haiku day on 5/7/5, because comment links are so gray and so small... What I needed was "Recent Comments" feature I saw on other blogs. My first though was to ask Simon, but this would be no fun. Instead, why not to try to tweak JSPs and see what will happen...

Well, what happened, after some hashing unknown tags and variables around, I got a relatively decent "Recent Comments" section for my blog. "Relatively" because it doesn't show recent comments, it shows all of them. But hey, that's pretty good for 20 minutes of mindless copy&paste exercises and without seeing any documentation.

I looked at JSPs from the default theme that are responsible for showing recent entries and comments, and picked up what I believed to be the most useful lines. Quickly enough it occurred to me that "comments to recent entries" is not the same as "recent comments to entries", so I decided to try to simply show all comments, just to check if this is possible. The first test failed because I left a wrong variable somewhere (something like ${recentDailyBlogEntry.comments} instead of ${blogEntry.comments} -- will I ever learn to pay attention?), and after one correction it worked!

It showed a link to the entry and commentator's name. Disappointed with easy success, I decided to continue my attempts to break Pebble and to add a date. Damn thing still worked. I bet if I boss it around changing date format from "long" to "short" it will work too! And it did.

I don't know how easily customized other blog software is, but I am impressed. I spent more time writing this report than actually "programming". This is, of course, because natural languages, unlike unnatural, don't provide any reusable tag library... Wait, no, they do.