I don’t have a way to test it, but I think adding the lines I’ve written here to the top of your site’s “.htaccess” file will solve the problem. This will remap the way of accessing the code that DreamHost doesn’t support into a way it should support.

If you don’t have access to the .htaccess file or want a different solution, you can edit the “live-comment-preview.php” file in your “wp-content/plugins” directory. Changing, on line 185 (about 8 lines from the end of the plugin script), the slash (/) just before “commentPreview.js” to a question mark (?) should accomplish the same thing.

Best of luck with the live preview. I’ve enjoyed it on my site.

Seriously. It really, really makes a difference and I can just about guarantee you that the recipient noticed.

Make the timestamp be the index field, and then just have the plugin list all the commented posts within a certain time period (say, a day). The list might be longer (or shorter if things were quiet) but it would let your once-a-day type visitors see at a glance which posts have been active since their last visit.

(I suddenly have insight into why commercial software projects are always late - because it’s fun for people who don’t have to actually write and test the code to say “hey, you know what else would be a good idea…”)

I’m definitely going to wait for feedback from Podz before I take any definite steps. And coding things myself won’t happen, alas - if necessary, I’ll try to find the funds to hire someone to do the coding.

I know that when I check the most-recently-commented section, I find it a little tricky to figure out which posts are new to me. I suggested including the commenter name because that’s a lot easier to remember than a number (”were there 232 posts before, or was it 223? better load it and check”). You might also consider a timestamp on the posts, so that the section output would be:

Most Recent Comments

“Republicans are bad”, last comment at 7:22 PM by Robert
“Marriage Equality Now”, last comment at 7:19 PM by Alsis39
…

and so on.

Now get coding!

You should be able to have exactly the same content as the old recent comments list, but the amount of computer time would be very small, both for adding comments to the recent comments list, and for displaying them.

It also occurs to me you might be able to solve the problem you describe by doing something that lets you create a cache file. Conceivably, a plug in could be written writes to a file when a new comment is made. It would put a comment at the top of the list and drop and old one off the bottom. Later, when the blog loads, it just reads the file.

That might be quicker than searching all the comments in the data base.

Class, I have no idea how much memory they have, unfortunately. (And yes, I’m on a shared server - it’s the only way I can afford).

Index, ThreadName, ThreadURL, CommenterName

When someone posts a new comment, have the commenting module kill the lowest-indexed row in that table and write in the new comment row. (So the table is always the same length - say, 30 rows).

Then your most-recent-comments section query can just be

select ThreadName, ThreadURL, CommenterName from TempTable

which is pretty negligible to do.

Would a daily update suffice?

Maybe you could display something like -

The following discussions recieved comments on [today's date]: [list relevant threads, with hyperlinks]
The following additional discussions received comments on [yesterday's date]: [list relevant threads, with hyperlinks]
….

and so on. Maybe continue listing any thread that was active within the prior week, updated once a day (midnight)?

Just a thought. Good luck with this.