I've got about three brewing posts for this place, but instead of actually writing them up, or finishing the book review I promised London.pm, I ended up spending Sunday yak-shaving.
In particular, I went through all the MT templates I needed to, adding comment pages inline (as opposed to the default templates which use horrible nasty popups), fixing their usability by moving the form elements around and writing some mildly hairy logic for a nice layout on the front page. I did look at Simplecomments, but decided against it. (Of course, today I've found a rant by Tom Coates about it. Now, I'm not that bothered about building a community or whatever here, but it's interesting to see what people who do care think about it.) It also means I've enabled TrackBack; time will tell if it's useful.
I've also tidied up the optional RSS feed that contains full entries. For a long time I've been fighting a losing battle that one of the initials in RSS stands for 'Summary', but the post-NNW world seems to think that having to visit a website is a grievous affront to their human rights, and an invitation to write scrapers. (Of course, I've done a bit of that in my time, too. Ho hum.) So I caved in.
Of course, I don't update chaff anything like frequently. In the unlikely case you really want to read more by me, I tend to linkdump on 2lmc's blog these days, and there's occasionally a new photo set on stem, my photo archive, which I'm considering adding RSS to. (Yay, more removed hairy mammal covering.)
Anyway, now that's done, I can get on and actually write something.
2003-02-11
Tom Coates
Well that's spooky - we've both done essentially the same things - made the same decisions - with our comments at pretty much exactly the same time. Fascinating world... Plus also, it's not a rant!
2003-02-11
paul mison
Yes, it is a little odd, although it's probably because we both dislike popup windows and had to redesign anyway, so we were able to use the best practice other people had found first.
The one thing I didn't do (although I did muse about it on Sunday night) is make the remember info choice use radio buttons, because I really couldn't be bothered writing the JavaScript.
Tom Insam pointed out Dan's comment pages yesterday, but I had a couple of JavaScript errors with IE, so I decided to leave it as is for the moment.
One subtle change I didn't mention is that, like use perl, I force comments to be previewed before they're posted. Whether people will find this annoying, or actually check what they've typed, we'll see.
On the subject of popup windows, Tom also pointed out a page that described why TrackBacks work better with popup windows.