Sunday, November 10, 2002

One of the goals of the new comment system is to make the comment pages accessible to search engines.  To do this, I  built the comment links to look like this:  http://www.commentsys.com/140/13/001001 instead of http://www.commentsys.com/frmcomments.php?user_id=140&;post_id=13 Enetation and haloscan use comment links with query strings of the form ?foo=bar&name=mike Google does not search urls with query strings very effectively.  Apache can be configured to recognize a url as a series of parameters seperated by slashes.  Thus, when Google spiders the site, it will treat all of the comment screens as seperate, valid links and index those as well as the main blog page.  This is how the radio userland comment system operates.  10:00:08 PM    comment []

I am spending my free time developing a web log comment system in PHP.  It will be hosted on a superfast server colocated at visi.com.  My goal is to make it fast, reliable and full featured.  I will only allow ~ 100 users and it will be free.  I expect it to be ready for public consumption on January 1, 2003.  The features, which may or may not all be ready by Jan 1 are:  count comments store cookies on guest machines allow site owner to delete comments. Allow site owner to block IP addresses Ability to have comments show up in line instead of on a separate page Works without javascript enabled in guests browser Code generation for blogger, Radio userland, diaryland Ability to require commenters to log on with valid email address Search Engines can see comments Site owners notified by email when comments posted Site owners can view stats about guests, page load times and number of reads for each post. Owners can export comments in a text file or xml format to back them up themselves. RSS feeds. Check back for progress and send an email if you want to help test it or reserve a slot when it goes online. My motivation for doing this is that the existing comment systems are getting a little bogged down because so many people are using them and I want the blogs I read regularly to have faster comments served. I also want to generate traffic to this blog and learn about hosting web services. 5:22:38 PM    comment []