Tuesday, 06 January 2004
Public beta: Alert reader Joshua Scholar is the first, including myself, to realize that I accidentally enabled comments earlier this afternoon. I've been fiddling around behind the scenes for about a week now, trying to get the Blosxom "writeback" plugin ready for prime time, and I inadvertently left it turned on when I posted my most recent article.
The plugin still has a few configuration issues, though (as Joshua was also first to notice, alas): I've managed to quickly fix the problem where paragraph breaks were being ignored, but the counters that show the number of comments per entry are still not updating in real time. (I also suspect that comments will look terrible on any style sheet other than the default one, but I haven't had time to check this yet.) I suppose having the comments "go live" will give me an incentive to fix these bugs right away, rather than procrastinating for another week… so, depending on your perspective, my blunder might be considered a good thing.
Anyhoo, I am delighted to discover that people are leaving comments, even if the technology isn't all there yet—I think I secretly suspected that my readership consists of my immediate family, four other bloggers, and LiveJournal's jackslack, so I'm glad to know that other people are reading, and to provide a forum for debate. (I should probably develop a comments policy or something; for now just pretend that my mother is reading the comments, since she probably is.) I'll see what I can do about smoothing out the rough edges, but in the meantime feel free to kick the tires.
Update: I think it's ready for prime time now (or, at least, no less ready than the rest of the blog). Jeff from Canned Platypus has also confessed that, although his blog is named after an item found in every tourist-trap souvenir shop from Sydney to Perth and back, he isn't actually an Aussie or an expat… so I've updated my blogroll to respect truth-in-advertising laws, and while I'm at it to include some new and interesting expat voices. (Besides, how can I not link to a blog named A Geek in Korea?)- Posted by Scott Forbes at 11:13 am. comments.
