March 19, 2003
A statement about comments.
Visitors have often mentioned that they’d like to see a comments system on my site (especially this guy). The various methods of communicating this request have run the gamut from meek asides to adamant insistence. I’ve always regarded the ability to leave comments as nice thing to have, but not something that had to exist for a weblog to be a weblog. This may be why I’ve never got around to mucking about with any of the multitude of third-party solutions out there. Every once in a while there has been talk about Blogger rolling out its own integrated comments — but I never got my hopes up.
I always assumed that when the time was right, I’d either move this whole weblog thing over to Moveable Type which has all that fancy-schmanciness built right in, or I’d slap something together on my own. Let’s focus on the latter of those two options. Believe it or not, I’ve started building a framework for my own comments system. One of the limitations in developing this system is the platform on which this server runs. We’re talking about a six year old PowerMac 9600 running a stripped down install of Mac OS 9.1, baby. It’s all WebStar, all the time. No Perl. No PHP. Nothing but NetCloak.
Keeping an incredibly open mind about this whole exercise, I’m anticipating that the system will still have most of the functionality found in many of the remote hosted comment services (like backBlog for instance, but without all the freakin’ smilies). Naturally, my optimism may need to dampened somewhat. NetCloak affords me the ability to set cookies to store user information, maintain persistent server-side variables for keeping track of the comment numbers, and of course, it also supplies the means to create and modify files directly on the server. But I still need to actually build this thing. That plate being laid on the table, a test version may be available by the end of the week.
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