Live comment preview is working again. At least, it should be. Let me know if anything is amiss.
Thereby hangs a tale. I had been using John Fraser’s excellent WMD Editor, which he made available as a hosted service from wmd-editor.com. He also released a downloadable version, that one could install for oneself, but since the hosted service was so convenient, I never got around it. Bad idea.
It seems that within a few months of releasing WMD Editor to the world, Fraser disappeared completely from the Internet. (I hope he’s okay, but I fear the worst.) A few months ago, the wmd-editor.com domain fell over, and poof, there went my live comment preview. I dug around a bit online, and discovered that I wasn’t the only one with this problem. The good people at Stack Overflow did yeomen service in reverse engineering how it worked. I took a relatively recent version of the code from the wmd-new project, installed the relevant files on my server, and tinkered until I had things working again.
There’s a lesson here. In Arthur Weasley’s words, “Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can’t see where it keeps its brain.”
