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WordPress for loosely-coupled comments, part 2
A couple of weeks ago I began using WordPress as a loosely-coupled
comment engine. This morning I wrote the glue code that fetches
the comments collected there and displays them here. It was
straightforward because WordPress supplies a general feed that tells
me if any item has updated, and a per-item feed that gives me the
comments for that item.
I've been proceeding slowly because I wanted to make sure that I
liked using the services I'm acquiring from WordPress. They include:
- Full and per-item feeds
- An effective, easy-to-use spam filter
- An effective, easy-to-use moderation queue
- A comment form that accepts HTML judiciously, applying strong filtering
Now that I've satisfied myself that these services meet my needs, I'm
stitching them in. But I'm still rather loosely coupled to
WordPress. Comments are just written out to JavaScript files
included here. Any process can write those files, and can assemble
them from any comment engine that provides the necessary integration
hooks.
I was hoping to also gain the services of the WYSIWYG editor that's
used in the main WordPress writing interface. But I forgot that the
comment engine doesn't use that editor. Which, in fact, helps to illustrate the
point of this exercise. If another engine with competitive
capabilities adds WYSIWYG comment writing, I'm in a position to switch to it.
Meanwhile, Tim Bray has been refining his
new comment engine which, like his blog-publishing system, is a
from-scratch effort. There are no value judgements to be made as
between his energetic approach and my lazy one. Tim wanted comments,
and used the opportunity to teach himself Ruby. I wanted comments,
and used the opportunity to try an integration experiment. We both got
the job done and learned useful things along the way.
Like Tim, I've gone years without comments, which raises the question:
"Why now?" For him, the example of Jonathan Schwartz showed that
the amount of interaction would manageable, and that the quality of it
would be high. For me, there's a different reason. Blogging, at first,
was highly
interactive, yet in a loosely-coupled way that I found really
compelling. It has surprised me to see how effectively the search
and bookmarking services are able to assemble the virtual
conversations formed when people link to other people. I came to
believe that, ideally, people should publish their own words in their
own online spaces, and syndicate them elsewhere as needed, rather than
publish their own words directly into other people's spaces. And for a
while, that seemed to work pretty well.
What changed? First, after the initial flush of blogging
excitement wore off for many people, the level of cross-blog
interactivity dropped off. Second, after the advent
of TechMeme, things became less interactive -- or anyway, that's how
it felt to me.
I've always valued interactivity, and hoped to achieve it in a
syndicated way. But when that method stopped
working as well as it had, I started to feel isolated, so I've gone
back to a traditional comment system in order to reconnect.
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