November 13, 2003

Reader Comments Now Included On Individual Entry Archives

While this site is not overwhelmed with reader comments, the ones received otfen are highly relevant to the subject at hand, and sometimes are from direct stakeholders or those involved. As such, I've made a change to the way the site handles comments. Specifically, reader comments are now included on the archive pages for each entry, rather than appearing in a disconnected popup.

All comment links should now lead to the reader comments section of the entry in question, with the comment form appearing beneath the reader comments. In part, I've made this change so that the text of reader comments is also indexed by Google along with the entries themselves.

Meanwhile, trackbacks will remain as popups. For those who don't know (and don't need to make use of them but might be interested in what they are), trackback is a method for writers of other weblogs to "ping" this site when they write about an item here, allowing readers here to follow the path back to that other weblog's reference.

Posted at 01:16 PM | PermalinkComments (6) | TrackBacks (0)
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Comments (6)

  1. The One True b!X on 13 Nov 2003

    Testing the new comment form. Mainly, whether or nto the "Remember personal info?" feature works or not.

  2. The One True b!X on 13 Nov 2003

    Hrm, didn't take. Made a change, let's try again.

  3. Wes Meltzer on 13 Nov 2003

    Any particular reason you're going to leave trackbacks as popups? I deliberately set them to look slightly different but otherwise appear on the individual entry pages, not so much because I get particularly many trackbacks as because I think that it's nice to allow them to intermingle.

    But hey, that's your call.

  4. The One True b!X on 13 Nov 2003

    Well, unless things have finally changed, trackbacks don't auto-rebuild the individual archive entry page. Back when I used to have both comments and trackbacks listed with the entry itself, I would have to either go re-save the entry after a trackback, or wait until someone posted a comment and the entry got rebuilt on its own anyway.

    Has this changed?

  5. Wes Meltzer on 13 Nov 2003

    There's a plugin called SimpleComments (I assume you're stripping HTML, so http://kalsey.com/2003/02/simplecomments/ ), which will allow you to put both comments and trackbacks in the same space, to give you an aggregated count if you want, and will force a rebuild whenever you get a trackback just like for a comment.

    In fact, I have no idea whether the entry rebuilds ordinarily with a comment. I've used SimpleComments ever since I switched over to using MT, so I guess I would be the wrong person to ask.

    Best of luck!

  6. The One True b!X on 13 Nov 2003

    Yeah, I'm not fond of the mixing of comments and trackbacks, which I think is that Simplecomments does. I know some consider trackbacks to simply be remote comments, but I don't come down on that side.

    And yeah, comments rebuild the entries. I just checked and trackbacks don't, in and of themselves, without plugin help. Apparently it has to do with potential timeouts.