In preparation for an overhaul of my website I wrote two new Blosxom plugins. The lastread plugin allows me to create a list of links to the last n articles that were viewed by readers. The lastcommented plugin allows me to create a list of links to the last n articles that had comments added by readers.
I took pains with these plugins so they only write their state files to disk when a single article is read (not when the index pages are hit) or when a comment is actually posted. I've also made it optional to not rewrite the state file if an already existing entry in the list is visited/commented again. There are a lot of Blosxom plugins that do a lot of work on every page access and I didn't want to add to the server load.
The configuration of each plugin is pretty straightforward. Both plugins require the Storable plugin for storing the state files. Only the lastcommented plugin requires any coding; whatever comment plugin you use needs to set a variable in order for lastcommented to do any work.
Updated 2007-06-23 to version 0.3 to fix unshift() error and ignore unknown file requests and filter out user defined HTTP Agents.
`Download the lastcommented plugin`_ Updated 2007-06-23 to version 0.2 to fix unshift() error.
Hopefully I'll have my new site design using these plugins available in a few weeks.