Developing Facebook-Style News Feed

Question

I'm really sorry if this question has already been asked, or answered, but I can't quite seem to find what I need.

I have every other piece of this built, my only question is surrounding inline comments. I would like to do something similar to what Facebook does where they render x comments with a button to display all y comments.

However, the only two ways I can see of doing this are:

1. Performing a SELECT in the loop that renders each item (I think anyone who might have an answer to this would agree with me that this is a terrible decision)
2. Performing one large select to pull all comments where news_id is in a certain subset, and then use PHP to iterate over them, select the x most recent, and ignore the rest.

Neither one of these seems like a good solution; however, as they both involve a huge waste of resources.

Does anyone have a potential suggestion for implementing this?

Answer 1

SELECT * FROM comments_table WHERE article_id = {something} LIMIT {no_of_comments_per_page} SORT BY date DESC

This is a very simple yet powerful query for the comments.

Actual code

<?php
$sql = "SELECT * FROM comments_table WHERE article_id = 24 LIMIT 40 SORT BY date DESC";
$data = mysql_query($sql);
$comments = mysql_fetch_assoc($data);
foreach($comments as $comment){
  $ct++;
  echo "ID: {$ct}";
  echo "<br />";
  echo "Comment: {$comment["comment"]} by {$comment["user"]}";
  echo "Date: {$comment["date"]}";
}
?>