Randall Leeds wrote:
On Tue, Mar 10, 2009 at 15:41, Luke Tucker <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
As for integrating internal commenting... I think it deserves some
thought. Part of me thinks it would be strange to sort of tear
any of the conversation away from the blog itself, but if I think
in the melkjug-as-planet sort of product it would be... kind of
interesting, ie planetdev.openplans.org
<http://planetdev.openplans.org> with the conversation of
planetdev readers collected around it. I feel like there may be
some way of saying to a blog hey there's a side conversation
happening at this other site... but not very well supported. Any
wordpress gurus know? What goes on with this sort of stuff in the
blog-network sort of world?
There is and it's called Trackback. If we ping the trackback URL then
the blog can automatically link back to a page on Melkjug that has
comments people have left there.
However, this conversation has made me think through these ideas a
little more and I've decided what we're looking at are two separate ideas.
Idea 1:
I referred to this idea as commenting 'on Melkjug'. I think the use of
the verb 'comment' here though has confused it with the notion of
commenting 'on the post'. Indeed, I think I was confused myself.
Leaving comments on the original feed is important and clean and we
should rethink this first idea as a "share on Melkjug with note"
function which has analogy in Google Reader. (Whether these could be
threaded is a fun, but tangential issue.) Seeing which other
Melk-people shared an article I'm reading and what they said would be
fun and could help people identify other users to follow. It should
not subsume the feed's native comment support.
Idea 2:
Scrape comments off the original post to display (read-only) on Melkjug.
I suspect it'd be difficult to widely support commenting 'on a post'
from Melkjug and I think we should *not* do this. In the case of
Disqus people need to log into Disqus to post their comments. We
should not try to tackle this sort of integration.
I totally agree with your focus and reasoning on this, but just as an
FYI, you already tackled the login issue by supporting OpenID. So if I
associated the same OpenID with my Disqus account there is no additional
login. Many WP sites also support commenting with a simple OpenID
login, so the case should be the same there. Obviously integrating with
external comment systems would really only be practical if there was an
established open standard for doing so and I don't think there is yet...
Instead, we can just scrape out the comments to display them on
Melkjug for popular platforms and this would be sufficient for
reading. Adding the 'New Comments' filter Luke suggested would be
sufficient for basic conversation tracking.
Disqus users could continue to track through Disqus after having
opened the original post, logged into Disqus, and posted their
comment. 'Share with note on Melkjug' would be good for community
building and personal notetaking, but entirely separate from the
dialogue of comments on the post itself.
On the topic of Disqus:
A first look at Disqus makes me think that from Melkjug's point of
view this is just a different format of comment to pick up. In other
words, where we might normally see a wordpress blog and pick up its
comments, we'll see a Disqus-enabled blog and we'll need to pick up
the Disqus thread. If we did implement something like a 'New Comments'
filter, this would be an independent and primitive way for Melkjug
users to track a dialogue, irrespective of Disqus integration on the
feed in question.
-Randall
