the bblog

commenting implemented

Commenting is now enabled for new entries on the blog. It's the form at the bottom of each entry's permlink page. Try it out!

There's a couple of reasons why it took so long.

Firstly, there is nothing more depressing than a blog with dozens of entries and zero comments.

Secondly, nanoblogger doesn't ship with a commenting system, so you have to implement one yourself. This requires effort, and I'm incredibly lazy.

Thirdly, I wanted to implement a complete commenting system, right from the get go. Threads, avatars, voting, anti-spam stuff, everything. The choices here are either complex PHP based systems, which require significant integration with the underlying CMS, or JS-Kit, which... doesn't. Since I am, as I may have stated before, lazy, I picked JS-Kit.

It really is alarmingly easy. You just add two lines, and it magically Just Works.

But! It's not perfect.

For one, it determines what comments to serve by looking at referrer headers. This means that http://bbot.org/blog/archives/2006/06/02/bicycles/, http://samuel.bierwagen.us/blog/archives/2006/06/02/bicycles/[*] and http://bbot.nfshost.com/blog/archives/2006/06/02/bicycles/, which all point to the same page, all return different comments.

*: I have Great Plans for bierwagen.us, but they're mildly nontrivial. Until I have to time to properly implement them, I set up a little CNAME redirect from samuel.bierwagen.us to bbot.org. This is immensely amusing (My name as a domain! Ha!) but decidedly unpractical, as "bierwagen" has to be spelled out, and if I'm spelling out a domain I'd rather do four letters than fourteen.

Also, JS-Kit being, hurr hurr, javascript based, NoScript will block it from executing. So, if the comment form isn't showing up at the bottom of the permlink page, allow both JS-Kit.com and bbot.org.

And, since JS-Kit is a third party, I have zero control over my data. If JS-Kit went bankrupt tomorrow, I would be completely screwed; an occurance which is not completely without precedent.

More ominously, JS-Kit could engage in data exortion. Right now, they start charging at 1 million pageviews a month. bbot.org currently gets ~2000 pageviews a month, but JS-Kit might lower the threshold, or I might get more readers. Stop laughing, it's possible!

So, while I do have comments, they are decidedly impermanent. Once JS-Kit goes out of business, or starts price-gouging, or is sued into oblivion, those comments will probably be gone forever. If you have something Really Important to say regarding a post of mine, I strongly advise you to just e-mail it to me at bbot@bbot.org[*].

*: Although, thinking about it, those e-mails end up in the hands of google, and aren't backed up either.

And, while I was at it, I disabled the atom feeds and the calendar. As far as I could tell, nobody was using the atom feeds, which, along with the calendar, soaked up a lot of cpu time during publishing to generate. Good riddance!

Have fun with the rest of your April fool's day.