If you use Blogger, chances are you've seen the news on the front page that
they'll be migrating existing blogs to the new system over the next couple
of weeks. Mostly, that's good news, since the new system seems to work for
the most part. However, you'll need to make a couple of little changes to
the way you link to your comments and call the commentCount function, to
keep your comments from breaking.

The new system uses 18-digit numbers for <$BlogItemNumber$>, rather than the
8-digits numbers the old system used. Assuming it's going to use them for
migrated blogs as well as newly created ones, that's a problem, because
that's one more digit of precision than a Javascript or PHP number, so
123456789012345678 turns into 1.2345678901234568 times 10 to the 17th, with
the 78 rounded up to 80, and that's a problem for you since your
javascript:viewComments(123456789012345678) link will end up opening a popup
for 123456789012345680, and since your page doesn't have an item with that
number, the count won't work (and in fact, wouldn't anyway, because PHP will
do the same rounding when calling the commentCount function).

The easy fix is to just edit your Blogger template, and add single quotes
around <$BlogItemNumber$> both places where it appears in the code that
makes the link, in the link href and the commentCount() call:

<a href="javascript:viewComments('<$BlogItemNumber$>')"><? echo
commentCount('<$BlogItemNumber$>'); ?></a>

That turns it into a string rather than a number, which is fine, since it
gets turned into one in both functions as soon as it's concatenated into a
URL anyway.

Unless I'm missing something (I just noticed this problem when someone asked
about it this morning), everything else seems to survive the change.

Phil Ringnalda