This morning, I decided spontaneously that I would finally attack the problem of hooking a commenting system into this site. I figured out a simple way to do this.

Now, many of you already use the Livejournal feed of this blog for comments. I appreciate that, since they did all the hard work and I'm just piggybacking on top of that. I decided that when building the page view for individual thingo entries (which you can find by following the link from LJ, or clicking on [link]), I would scrape the LJ page for my feed and figure out what URL they're using to represent that entry. Then I can embed that link in my blog to direct people to the appropriate page for comments. For bonus points, I'd cache the URL so that I can go back later and see old comments.

Mission accomplished, sort of. If you're looking at the single entry view for this entry, there's a fair chance that you'll see a comments link at the bottom. The caching doesn't seem to be working, but I'm not worried about that problem. You see, the big issue is that LJ doesn't seem to store old syndicated posts and their comments. All the wonderful comments you've left in the past are gone! We can't revisit our discussion on whether Harry Potter can be choked underwater, for example.

I guess I'm left with a couple of options. I can write my own commenting system. Writing blog software was an interesting exercise in 2000, but at this point I can't see the point; frankly, other people have done much better jobs at this than I ever will. I can become a partial sell-out and install popular blogging software like Blosxom or MoveableType, or become a total sell-out and use a hosted blogging site. In both cases, I would want to find an automated way to pump all my old blog entries into the new system. Or I can abandon comments altogether and remain a Web 1.0 curmudgeon (as my uncle would say, I can embrace trailing-edge technology).

Er, comments?