Comments?

The problem with having a load-balanced domain is that when you need to write dynamic data, it's only going to be accessible to one of the servers until you've synced them. Such is the problem that I have here with comments, and for that and other reasons I wasn't going to bother with comments at all.

But I do like getting feedback. So I got the blosxom writeback plugin and spent a while configuring that. Now I'm contemplating writing some syncing software to run on cron or whatever that'll get the comments from each server, collate them, and spit them back.

Another approach I considered was to use my email feedback form on each of the entries, which is a problem since then it'll show the form for each entry on the front page unless I use a link, and then to include the comments in the actual entries themselves. Far from optimal, which is why I got the writeback plugin.

The email submission and post inclusion idea does have two things going for it, though: it means that i) I can vet all of the submissions, and ii) the comments aren't held in a different location and so don't get neglected like the ones on miscoranda were, causing them to be lost on the Great Vorpal Crash.

Another idea is to route all of the comments to a pastebin, which would be quite funny but would have the problem that it's the difficult to get a definitive list of all the comments for a particular entry. On the other hand I could wait until I've decided to set up a dynamic subdomain of inamidst.com, which I've been planning for a while now.

Cite: Palmer, S.B. (2005). "Comments?", in: What Planet is This?
Archival URI: http://inamidst.com/notes/commenting