Friday, July 01, 2005

On Comments and...“an ‘Arse Feed’ You Say?”

Warning: this post is technicality-heavy. But I think you might find the information helpful...leave a comment after you finish reading whatever you felt like reading, anyway :)

As Gravi-T noticed and pointed out, I changed the commenting page. My comments are now hosted on HaloScan. You can find its logo on the "Powered By" section of this site's side bar.

What does this change for you? When you click on the "comments (n)" link, a popup window will open, listing the comments for this post, and on the bottom you can type your own comments. If you're a Blogger user, the new window won't automatically fill in your name and profile any more...you'll have to type them in, but your browser will probably remember them the next time. Otherwise, I don't see the change bringing anything bad for my dear readers :) You can still use bold, italics formatting and links in your comments, and a bonus is "clickable smileys". They are easily accessible when you click the "?" besides "Comment:" on the popup.

The switch wasn't painless. I had to copy/paste all the comments you left on Blogger, and edit their time and commenter's name, and homepage. It took about 3 hours! So why the switch? It's mainly for my benefit :) As I post more, it can get hard to keep track of comments. It's not so bad with the newer posts, since I see how many comments there are in the main page, and I could tell if there were new posts by remembering how many comments there were before. But if I wanted to find a comment on an old post, maybe because I just remembered I could write something about it, it'll take very long to dig it out. HaloScan can display all my comments in one page, where I can edit, delete, and search them.

HaloScan also provides an "RSS feed" of the comments—this term might sound mystical to you, but it works very much like email, and in fact you can use Thunderbird to read a feed. So the comments won't spam my email inbox, and I can look at them in an organized, familiar interface. By the way, the blog itself also uses "RSS" technology, meaning you can read my postings in Thunderbird. There are many more programs you can use to read RSS feeds, but so far my favorite is NewsGator Web edition. You don't need to download and launch a program, because this works on a website. I've subscribed to some of my "Friends with Blogs'" blogs very easily, allowing me to see if they have new posts at a glance. I encourage you to try it out, and feel free to ask questions in the comments.

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