Comments

My comments system now supports avatars (check out my digital doppleganger). I'm using Gravatar. You'll need to sign up with Gravatar to get your very own avatar.

Oh, you won't see your avatar in the "Preview" mode. If you've got your Gravatar ID correct (it's the email address you registered with Gravatar) it'll work. I'll see about fixing that, but it's a real low on my list of priorities.

I've abused my power to fix the avatar on all of my old posts (or at least everything that claimed to be me). If you've previously posted and I know you personally, shoot me an email message with your Gravatar ID and the name you use here and I'll fix up your old messages.

That seemed needlessly obnoxious to set up. You should put in an option for those of us with our own sites that don't mind hotlinking a small image from them.

Also, are you going to do a write up of that thing of which you were considering doing a write up

I got some suggestions:

1. Your "remember me" option is oddly broken. When I start typing junk in, it is there, when I preview and go back to the previous page, it still isn't there. It has very weird semantics and often my computer forgets about it all together. If I uncheck the remember me box, it should forget about me...

2. After submitting a comment, there should be a link both to the original article and back to the home page. Right now there is only the former.

3. Upon hitting preview, I get this message at the top of the screen:

"The following problems must be fixed before your message can be added:

* The provided Gravatar ID is neither an email address nor an MD5 hash."

That looks like GravatarID is not optional.

4. Nowhere in the comment pages does it permanently swear your fealty to me.

That is all.

- Allowing linking to arbitrary images: I think not. I've had quite enough half-meg animated gifs courtesy of various web forums. Gravatar gives me simple filtering and eliminates lots of potential abuse.

- "The thing I was considering writing up": I'm still planning on doing it. Just sooooo busy.

- Remember me: - Crud, I thought I got it working. It should work as you describe: unchecking it "forgets" you. I'll check it again.

- Link to home page: - Eh, sure.

- You need to provide a Gravatar ID: - Crappity, crap, crap. Lemme try to fix that one right now. It's clearly not correct.

- Fealty: :-p

Testing.

I've fixed the Gravatar ID bug. You can post without one now.

This is a test to see if the remember me thing works. It looks like it does so far. Yay! a few previews, back ups, and reloads later, it seems to be working!

Thanks.

Ah, how about this. When I came back the comment section later, it remembered me, but the checkbox wasn't checked anymore. It still seems to remember me, but if you want to keep the illusion of not keeping cookies if the box isn't checked, then you have to make it checked all the time unless I specifically uncheck it.

I think I fixed the "Remember me" forgetting about you bug.

Let's see if you did....

looks like you did so far....

Oh sure, NOW you fix the Gravatar bug, after I went and signed up for one so I could post. Now I can't remember what I wanted to post about...

Actually, I simply stuck in "mozilla@example.com" for my gravatar id. It let me post..... :)

Hey, what about a link back to highprogrammer.com on the comment page in addition to the link to the original document. As of now, there isn't a backpath from the comment page to the home page and it is annoying.

I have another idea. How about using your cookies to remember how many comments there were on a thread when I alst visited, and showing a little "new" next to a link when I come back and there are more?

Re: "New" links. I'll think about it. It's non-trivial, but certainly doable. However, I will reveal my secret interface for scanning new comments:

http://www.highprogrammer.com/cgi-bin/comment...

This lets you see comments in the last week. Bounce on "Previous" to see previus weeks. The links above a group of comments are for the original article and the comments page respectively.

This is a test. This is only a test.

YAY!

In the unlike event you care, there is an RSS feed for comments now: http://www.highprogrammer.com/cgi-bin/comment...

It's the full comments feed; similar to http://www.highprogrammer.com/cgi-bin/comment... . I'll probably add a per-page feed eventually. But not today.

Gravatar - thanks for the nice system