The blog you're reading is running on a homebrew perl engine that I wrote for the purpose of allowing customers to edit content on their page without needing ssh access to the server. That's a little daunting for people if they just want to change a few lines of text. The code is a few hundred lines and has a configuration file that is independent from the executable code. There's also no database, just a series of flat files. It's pretty basic, but it has served me well.

After learning what I have of Java and AJAX, I'd like to make some improvements. At the moment, nobody can comment on my posts, so I rarely get feedback. I occasionally post links on facebook where people can comment, but that seems like a lot of separation of content to me. When looking at other blog and community sites, I've discovered some things about how comments are handled and, in my opinion, what works and what doesn't.

I don't like the forum layout except for getting questions answered. Even then, it seems a little clunky without a working knowledge of the forum's organization. It seems to me that forums aren't a streamlined mechanism for community building because of their rigid organizational structure. Tagging would be an improvement on this because the user is more likely to guess a single tag correctly than guess the category a post is placed in sometimes.

Blogger/blogspot has an extremely clunky comment system. Posting a comment requires going to a new screen where, by default, the context of the comment you are about to make is removed from that screen. It's a small annoyance to make an extra click to see the orriginal post, but an annoyance nonetheless. Even then, the interface feels cramped since it is limited in width and has two columns of information showing.

Science Blogs is getting there. When you click on the permalink for a post the orriginal post, all the comments and a form to enter your comment are all displayed in-line on the page. It almost forces you to pre-read or at least scan the comments before yours prior to making a new comment, which is good for a community that has a tendency to not read things before spouting off duplicate comments. Not that I'm saying that's what the commenters there do, just that I've seen it before. Particularly on the Gawker Media websites.

Gizmodo and Gawker Media, are also getting there. They changed their commenting system a couple years ago to force users to log in, which I know annoyed some veterans of the site. This has given them the ability to store your preferences for following other commenters or bookmarking your favorite posts. Many of the Gawker sites will honor your login from another Gawker site, which is very good, but some of them don't for some reason. That forces you to either log in again or create a new account. While that's not bad when you consider that the sites are not all the same and will have different readership and a different commenter base, it's a little annoying for users who are fans of the Gawker network as a whole. This sticks out especially so when one site crosslinks to another Gawker site and I can't comment there.

Facebook has made leaps and bounds in the community department, but their AJAX implementations seem to be a little random at times. I can refresh my news feed and get a completely different set of items, there are some people I rarely see in my feed even though I can see that their status has been updated, and there seems to be some sort of persistence algorithm that removes items from my feed after facebook is bored with them even if I haven't seen them yet. They do have a good, if militant system of notifications that not only sends you an email when someone has commented on you or something you have commented on but also tells you on the webiste, just in case you aren't following your email. It can get a little confusing at times since the email contains all the same content you would see on the website (usually) and I have a tendency to think "haven't I seen this?"

Flickr, despite being primarily a photo-sharing site has what I think is the pinacle of comment management. The news feed on your home page shows every photograph you're associated in one handy place. This is a change from the format that I actually liked better which showed comments on your photographs on one page and comments made after your comments on other photographs on another page. This keeps users interested. I comment on Gizmodo and on Science Blogs occasionally, when I feel I have something to say, but I don't get any feedback there. Someone could comment in direct response to my comment and i wouldn't know. At Gizmodo, I can go to my profile page and get links to all the comments I've made but then I have to click on that link to see if anyone commented after me and then filter through all the comments after mine to see if any of them are related. At Science Blogs, I have to remember what I commented on and go digging through the posts to find my comment and see what other people had to say. With Flickr, I can go to my home page and see that 8 people have commented since I commented on a photo (shown in thumbnail form) and read the comments right there.

As a result of my frustrations and happinesses of commenting in online communities, I've come up with a wish-list for the new blog engine that I'm working on.

1. Users should be allowed to log in to make a post, but not forced to if they wish to remain anonymous. (Blogger)
2. Users who wish to get a commenting account can comment with a username and password, if I like what they have to say or at least think it's interesting, I grant them an account. (Gawker)
3. Users can see the last several comments on posts that they have commented on by logging in and going to their homepage. (flickr)
4. Other users can see what commenters have posted by clicking on a commenter's name. (Gawker)

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