CoComment Holiday

It’s a sad day for me right now – I’ve had to strip the coComment integration code out of the blog. After chasing down errors for the past couple of days, I finally came back around to my original suspect, and sure enough removing coComment from the equation seems to solve all problems. (I probably would have isolated the problem a bit sooner, but conflicts with extensions and browser-caching issues were muddying the waters. That and I was panicking – my pretty blog was broken and I didn’t know why!)

Hopefully this is just a temporary measure.

I love coComment and all it does, and am still an avid supporter of the system, but at the moment full integration is breaking things with a *bit* more frequency than I am really happy with. This is especially taking into consideration the non-coCo users of this blog who are still in the majority, despite my constant harping-on about coCo! Here at Bright Meadow more than half the fun often happens in the comments – if you can’t comment, well, it’s just not cricket.

coComment first came to my attention around the same time as another comment-tracking system. That other system, MyComment, relied on the blog-owner to have a plugin that enabled a commenter to track any comments he’d/she’d made on that blog. coCo, in a subtle but important distinction, relies on the commenter to have a bookmarklet/extension on their end. Comments are tied (primarily) to the commenter and only secondarily to a particular blog. A blog-owner needs to know nothing about coComment, and perhaps more importantly, to do nothing – if a commenter wants to track their own conversations it is, quite sensibly, up to them.

That being said, an extra level of functionality was introduced fairly recently, which enabled blog-owners to integrate coComment into their blogs. With the addition of a couple of lines of javascript, all comments made on a blog are automatically submitted to coComment. If they are made by a coCommenter, then the comments get added to the appropriate person’s conversations. If they are made by a non-coCo-peep, then they just get added to the appropriate blog/post page *1*

This functionality excited me and still does – though I publish an RSS feed for the comments on this blog (found here), and though I get email notifications of all comments made, tracking comments is hard when I am at work as I don’t have access to a feed reader, or to webmail. With the integration however, I just have to periodically check a single webpage to be notified of any new comments made across Bright Meadow.

This isn’t the only reason I use coComment, or decided to integrate it into the blog, but it is the bit that is going to be affected most by my current decision.

I don’t anticipate this decision being final – hopefully in a day or so I’ll be able to put the integration code back in and all will once again be well and shiny in my commenting world. This is the price you pay for playing with beta technologies. Sometimes things have to go on a little safari before they work properly. Sometimes new and fantastical beasts are found. Other times you get stuck in the swamps and need to be rescued. It’s this exploration that makes it exciting!

As I said, here’s hoping Bright Meadow can be fully integrated again soon 🙂

Endnotes:
*1* Blogs have a page of their own that conversations get added to – Bright Meadow’s is here. Each individual post/conversation thread also gets a page, as does each commenter. A veritable smorgasbord of options on how you can track conversations!Back

cocomment, conversation, comments

11 thoughts on “CoComment Holiday

  1. Well, I’ll still use cocomment anyway. I know how it feels like to have something major like this affect the blog and personally, the delay doesn’t bother me much. I had to take down cocomment from my own site too, if only cause for some reason, I just couldn’t get it to integrate properly.

    *Ok, I’ve tried to use cocomment individually, but it kept giving me an error. I think this may be cocomment itself and not your blog.

  2. Cas,
    I’m really sorry. We are encountering repeating problems with our hosting and the all instance of coComment that is running there. We are fire fighting this non-acceptable issue. Hope to see you back with us 🙂

  3. Edrei, I’m still using coComment for myself as well (well, when it works!) and yes, the problem is coComment’s side.

    To integrate coComment into the blog was surprisingly easy once I worked out where the javascript had to go (comments.php) – what the code basically does is submit the comment to coCo as well as the blog in question. Alas, when coCo isn’t working for whatever reason, you get an error message and are unable to comment at all on the given blog (unless you use IE or IE for Mac/turn javascript off). As I can’t rely on all my readers to HAVE IE or turn javascript off, the integration had to go for now.

    And Nicolas, that’s ok. Good luck! 😀

  4. I wonder if the problem is astrological as Mercury retrograde nears … I’ll coCo manually as usual and see how I go.

  5. Let’s just see if all is once more well with my commenting world. (This comment was made with full integration back in my comments.php file). Fingers crossed!

  6. Cas, I hope you don’t mind my testing the coCo application here. When I activate the bookmarklet, it now freezes my browser for 32 seconds (prior to this, the delay was usually five seconds, though it had been at 18 seconds). Seems to be OK here for me, with hardly any delay, but I cannot see an empty box for the tags. Weird, huh? I seem to be the only person who has these continual problems with the service—but then, I put coCo through its paces more than anyone else!

  7. Test away Jack 🙂

    I don’t use the bookmarklet so I don’t notice the same problems you seem to have. Theoretically here you shouldn’t need the bookmarklet at all as I still have the javascript lurking in my code to do the job for you. I think it’s still working, but then I have the firefox extension as well…

    Ok, just checked in Safari (no extension, no bookmarklet) and yes the integrated code does show, giving you the option to ‘track the conversation’, but no way to sign in or add tags… Odd.

    I hope you get the problems sorted soon Jack. Which reminds me, I need to report a problem with title extractions… Ah, the life of early adopters and beta-users 😀

  8. Thanks, Cas. I never thought of myself as an early adopter, but here I am, being one! I am using Maxthon, which has the IE6 engine, but I have confirmed the bugs on IE6 as well. Unfortunately, with this platform I have to use the bookmarklet, but Firefox on PC is almost instantaneous.
       Fortunately, the delay is now down to around 12 seconds, but last night it got as bad as 57 seconds.
       In case you are wondering, I have very legitimate reasons to stay with Maxthon, because of Firefox’s and Netscape’s poor typographic handling. Up to Netscape 4·7, all was well … then 6 came out and no one bothered. Ironically, that was when IE5 had excellent typography, and I switched grudgingly.

  9. Pingback: Bright Meadow » Comment Woes (again)

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