If you go to the comments page you’ll notice that there are coloured bars next to each comment. Each colour is unique(ish) to the entry the comment is about. In theory you’ll be able to visually match them up but in practice it’s not at all clear and sequential entries have very similar colours so it probably won’t stay that way, but it’s an interesting idea, I think, and has potential for other applications.
Here’s how I do it. Colours are generated on web pages using a number of different techiniques, one of which is the “short hex” number where #049 is a darkish blue, #627 is a purple, #483 is a green and so on. Each entry in my database has a unique ID – the previous entry to this is number 4853 for example. In the Movable Type template I put the in this attribute for each comment:
style=”border-left : solid #<MTCommentEntry><$MTEntryID trim_to=”3″$></MTCommentEntry> 5px”
which gives any comments to the aforementioned entry the following:
style=”border-left : solid #485 5px”
resulting in a nice green bar.
Like I said, it’s not at all useful as it stands though it does mark out those comments on ages old posts but I only threw it together in about 10 minutes. However, the potentials for this sort of thing are interesting. For example, the colour scheme for this site could change as items are added to it. One month it scrolls through blue, the next green and so on. A dramatic change in colour since your last visit would mean you’d missed a lot (or that I rebuilt the database…) while if it’s still the same shade not much has changed.
Another idea would be to take this data and use it to grab a thumbnail from Flickr using something like the Flickr Colr Pickr, keeping the “colour spectrum as time” idea but using more unique icons to differentiate between posts.
Anyway, that’s my brainstorm in the shower idea for today.
[Update: there's now a colour bar at the top of most pages (my style-sheet implementation isn't very consistent at the moment...) which will change over time. Be interesting to see if a really gross colour makes me post more and vice versa.]
Can I ask what shower gel you use? I could do with some good ideas myself you see…
I like this, subtle, non-intrusive yet effective. Yes yes, very good indeed.
Just soap. Not having any hair to speak of shampoo is not necessary and so the combi-effects of shower gell don’t really apply.
For the record I tend to default to Imperial Leather. I am, however, not very good at throwing it away.
Observant people will have noticed that due to my cropping the entry ID to the first three digits the colour bar will only with every ten entries. Unfortunately I can’t currently crop backwards, as it were (though I reckon I know how to do it once I find the reference) but since the same numbering system applies to weblog, linkog and podcast posts it should change every day or so.