Labnotes

Yep, we’ve been TechCrunched. This is old news by now, at least at the rate the blogopshere is moving, but still bears repeating. Lots of positive comments, so I guess we’re on to something good.

As Michael says, “The site is a bit raw and unstable”. After all, it started from a small project to scratch an itch, to solve a problem I had. For a while, I ran it on my computer, checking for new comments every morning, before I realized it begs to be shared with more people.

How many more people? It grew from two to ten, and then Scoble and MetaFilter posted about it … and the server crashed. The rest of the week was an excercise in patience, as it was barely keeping up with the load. It took a few more weeks to get things straightened up.

Last week it was finally getting ready for prime time. I’m glad to see it’s managing well so far, but then you’d expect that from open source technologies.

And the more people use it, the better feedback we get to keep improving. I especially like Michael’s suggetions:

As co.mments evolves, there are a number of features I’d like to see added. First is a way to tag posts while bookmarking them for easier search later, as well as grouping with other users’ bookmarks by tag. There also should be more social aspects in general - for example, I’d like to know if others (and who, and how many) are also tracking a post.

One unavoidable issue - you can’t hit the bookmark button unless you are on the permanent URL for a post. Just being on Techcrunch.com, for example, won’t work. A nice feature would be a drop down list of all posts that are included on a URL (which would be easy to do by looking at the RSS for a page) if you aren’t on the permanent URL page for a post.

All better ways to help you stay on top of the conversations. That’s the official co.mments moto. And yes, there will be more great stuff coming down the road.

_{Reposted from co.mments.}

co.mments has just settled in it’s new home. A beautiful, spacious server with lots of room and a scenic view. Minus the scenic view.

Besides that, it now has its very own co.mments blog. So if you want to check out what’s new with co.mments, what features are coming, make your own suggestions, voice your opinion, etc, head over to the new blog.

This blog will now resume its normal scheduled programming. Ruby, Ajax, microformats, WordPress and my personal raves and rants. And some behind the scene discussions on the making of co.mments.

The co.mments server is maxed out. A lot of users, and I thank you all, but the poor server just can’t take the load. It’s barely managing to pull through.

So bear with me one more day. Because tomorrow, Friday night at 11pm Pacific co.mments is going down for maintenance for a few hours. And when it comes back, it will be running on a new server. And the new server is FAST.

Ben Metcalfe raises an interesting point:

Of course, I’m not advocating the editing of comments, but ultimately it’s important for a blog owner to be able to do so - in the event of inappropriate, libellous or offensive content for example.

At the end of the day, blog owners need to decide which comments get published and which don’t. Your blog is your castle.

I don’t necessarily agree with every decision, but I have to respect it. If my comment gets rejected, I can post my opinion on my own blog. And if nothing else, moderation is the only thing standing between us and a sea of comment spam. I moderate comments. I hate doing that, I think it’s annoying to my readers. But not as annoying as having comment threads full of solicitations for online casinos and erotic services.

I designed co.mments so it only reads comments that have been published, whether automatically or after moderation. It will also remove comments from the database, if it detects that they are removed from the blog. It makes no judgement, it simply respect the blogger’s authority of their own blog.

And another quote from Ben:

The reason this issue is arising is simply because there is no standard way to semantically represent comments.

As Betsy Devine points out in the comments section, there’s some initial work on a microformat for comments. I’m an active participator in Microformats and I can’t wait for this effort to get off the ground. But I also know it will take a while. Be hopeful, but don’t hold your breath.

Last night I managed to break the DNS records by reading the wrong help page, so for a while co.mments was inaccessible to many of you. I filed a support ticket with my DNS provider, and they promised to get back to me sometime tomorrow(!). Fortunately, their automated support system redirected me to the right help page, and I got it fixed. Needless to say, I’m not happy with them.

But I did manage to squeeze in a few improvements while waiting for the problem to be fixed. MetaFilter works better in this release, and you can also track comments from Upcoming.org. New users registering will also receive an e-mail with some brief instructions.

When we come back:

1. Multilingual support. This was a sore point and will be fixed in the new release.
2. Support for a few more blogs, MetaFilter and Upcoming.org.
3. Feeds will show number of unread comments in title and longer titles.
4. A few performance improvements.

I got tired of how hard it is to follow all the interesting conversations happening in the comments. It’s just tedious to go back and check for updates. So I decided to do something about it.

Let me introduce you to co.mments.com.

It’s a simple idea. Bookmark a conversation you want to follow from your browser, and get all the new comments delivered to your feed reader. The co.mments server takes care of finding out new comments, grouping them by conversation and keeping track of the ones you’ve read.

Right now it will work with most WordPress and MovableType blogs, Blogger, Flickr and Digg. More coming up.

It’s the first release, so be patient. It’s rough around the edges, not all the features are there yet, and it’s not the fastest server in the world. But it’s functional and you can try it out today. And if there’s a feature you want, or an improvement you can think of, just let me know.

Update: I’m getting a lot of traffic from MetaFilter, so I went and added it. Now you can also bookmark MetaFilter discussions.