This is not specific to co.mments, but a worthwhile plugin for WordPress users.

If you like to turn comments off on old posts, or even just trackbacks, this plugin by Being Mr Kenny will make your life much easier. It has simple and advance settings for managing comments on new and old posts.

Advanced Settings

This section gives you more control over discussion options. You can choose whether you want to open/close comments or pings, or both. You can also choose whether you want to change the default setting for new posts.

In the “Which posts?” section, you can choose which groups of posts you want to affect. The first two are for new posts and existing posts respectively. The third option allows you to open/close discussion on posts made before or after a specific date. The fourth option allows you to, for example, open discussion on the last five posts, or on posts made in the last month, or the last 2 years. It then closes discussion on the remaining posts.

Via Blogging Pro.

Every time I add a new feature to co.mments, I’m piling code on top of existing code. At some point it starts looking like the messy living room of a bachelor pad, dishes, books, CDs, everywhere. You can’t move around in the mess. So it was time for some spring cleaning.

I reorganized a lot of code, dusted up some old stuff. Less mess so I can easily add new features.

The best part is the new login system, which fixes the old nutty one, and makes it easy to login from different computers. You complained about the schizo login system before, and now I fixed it so it will work the way you expect it to.

That’s a good lesson in software design, and also a good one in organizing your life.

I developed co.mments for my own personal use, and when I decided to make it a free service, I wrote a login system so you can register for a free account. A few weeks later, Gabe Rivera convinced me to let people use co.mments without registering for an account. So I added that feature as well. I love it.

The co.mments data belongs to all of you, and I wanted to open it up, so last week I released the co.mments API. That uses another login system. Three of them is too much, and I couldn’t find my way through the mess. So I spent the week tidying up and fighting dust bunnies, and now there’s less mess, less code and one new feature. You can login to your account from several computers.

And if you accidentally bookmark a conversation but forget to login, login immediately and the recently bookmarked conversations will be added to your account.

I also picked two good habits out of developing the co.mments API. I used REST and XOXO to keep the code simple. I decided to use them out of technical curiosity, and ended up with much simpler, better organized code. And simpler is easier to develop. In fact, I wrote most of the API in just a couple of days.

IconBuffet has a great article on how REST helped them simplify their code. Technology aside, keep things simple, tidy the mess once in a while, and you can do more with your life. Spring clean often.

I and perhaps many of the co.mments.com users are very pleased with this service. May I ask on the behalf of other curious users: what is the catch? And when will it come?

So rather than having to click the bookmarklet for each comments page, we can just track the whole site.

Some people may not see the need for this, especially if a blog is very busy and have many many comments. But for a more quiet blog, with only several comments. It’s useful, I think.

Hurry!

The co.mments API is finally out. Feels like giving birth to a child.

Right now you can use it to manage the conversations you are tracking. All the UI features are available in the API.

I’ll be adding more features in the future, this is just the first release.

It’s also an early release, I just put it out yesterday and I’m still testing it. So you can expect some minor changes. In fact, if you have any feedback, post it here. I’d love to know what you think and what I can do to improve it.

There’s no documentation, that’s also something I’m working on.

But it’s RESTful, and it does XML, JSON and HTML, which means it’s not hard to figure out. In fact, you can try it from your browser right now. Play with it and I’m sure you’ll figure it out.

1. Is this the right place to ask for help?

2. I’ve got the bookmarklet on my Opera Browser. When I click the bookmarklet, I’m taken to the co.mments.com page, where I have to click Track. Isn’t this second step redundant? Or is it just in Opera?

Now 2 things regarding being updated with new comments:

3. It seems that I have to click the “Recheck” button on each individual conversation I’m tracking in order to find out if there are any new comments. Is this the way it’s supposed to be? I’d rather have co.mments.com automatically recheck all my conversations.

4. I have added the feed into my bloglines.com account. But yet, it doesn’t seem to be able to find updates. What’s up with that? Or it only finds updates, after I click the “Recheck” button on a conversation in the co.mments.com website and if I don’t “Clear” the new updates. hmmm… If I have to go to the co.mments.com website first before my bloglines will tell me of new comments, it’s kind of useless to add this feed to bloglines.

I wrote a plugin for LifeType to automatically add the co.mments links for each post. I am interested in seeing how well this works. I don’t know how well co.mments it will parse the comments on LifeType. If some tags are defined to be put in the comments to help parsing, I will modify the plugin.Right now it is check into svn, I will update the wiki as soon as it is posted on sourceforge.

I just rolled out some UI fixes, based on several requests I got from you. So thanks for e-mailing and commenting, your feedback will help make co.mments a better service for all of you.

Clicking on the Recheck button or bookmarking a conversation will now update it in real time.
I also fixed a mysterious problem that made co.mments impossible to use with Internet Explorer. I have to admit, I’m still not sure what the problem was, just that I found a workaround.

In fact I’ve been struggling with Internet Explorer the past week. The computer I use refuses to work with co.mments at all, and I can’t get to re-install IE. It might be time to reinstall windows.

I’m also rolling out an API for co.mments, in fact the code is almost finish and it’s time to write up the documentation. I’ll keep you posted.

Hi,

Any thoughts on making an OPML available or provide multiple RSS feeds structured where each comment is an item and the permalink is the channel? Possibly keeping same url format and adding a parameter to decipher a feed/channel by using permalink title.

A Curious Stranger posted this:

Enter co.mments. Use the bookmarklet to save a post you’ve commented on, and co.mments will magically keep track of new comments on the post. You can then pop your co.mments tracking page into your RSS reader, and you’ll never miss a good conversation again.

I kept this post in my feed reader for three days now, I just like reading the title.

Awesomer than David Lee Roth doing Bluegrass. Now that’s catchy.

(Read elsewhere on that blog to find out if that’s good or bad)