Some thoughts on comments
When I was planning the current incarnation of this blog, one of my goals was to have it require as little maintenance as possible. I decided that the best way to achieve this was to make the site fully static. This means that there's no server-side software to patch or maintain, so I don't need to worry about keeping track of WordPress bugs or anything. Just a bunch of static documents on a web server — doesn't get much simpler than that.
One limitation of a static blog is that it doesn't support comments on posts. To get around this, I thought about using a service that provides off-site comment hosting. Via TechCrunch, I learned about a bunch of these: CoComment, Disqus, Intense Debate, SezWho. My favorite was JS-Kit, mainly because it's incredibly easy to set up. However, after a brief trial period, I decided that I wasn't comfortable giving a (possibly short-lived) startup the power to add arbitrary content to my site, so I abandoned this approach.
I'm not sure what to do. I don't want to give up the simplicity of my current setup, nor do I want to deal with comment spam or anonymous assholes. At the same time, I would like to give people some convenient way of providing feedback on my posts. But after re-reading Joel Spolsky's thoughts on this issue (as well as the post by Dave Winer that inspired him), I'm not sure that allowing comment posting on my site is the right way to do that.
Any suggestions? E-mail them to me, I guess.
Tags: meta
Thu, 29 Nov 2007 22:46 UTC