Marco Luthe Online!

I have seen many blogs where the author’s comments are shown in a specific way. This makes sense if you – as the author – are answering specific questions. I have seen this on many plugin sites. Marking your comments makes it easier for your visitors to see important answers.

Inspired by the “Author Highlight” plugin for wordpress, I put some simple code into the loop of my comments.php which shows a “This is a comment by the weblog author” note below the date and time of the post:

<?php if(strcasecmp($comment->comment_author_email, 'youraddress@yourhost') == 0)
{
echo "<span style='color:blue; font-weight:bold'>This is a comment from the weblog author.</span>";
}
?>

[Update from 2008-06-24]

Matt Cutts actually describes a nicer different method by identifying the author’s ID in this post. [Update] That only works if you are logged in while commenting – otherwise, the user_id is “0″ and the highlighting won’t show.