I just added keyboard shortcuts to co.mments, so if you prefer to use keyboard over mouse, here’s another way to use your tracking page.

You can use j and k to move to the next and previous conversations. If you’re using GMail or Bloglines, you’re already familiar with these shortcuts.

Use o to open and see comments from the conversation, o again to close it. Click return to go the blog post, and in combination with shift to open in a new window.

You can see a list of all keyboard shortcuts here.

Sociable

If you’re a WordPress user, check out Sociable. It’s a plugin that adds links to all the social sites.

Social bookmarking sites allow websurfers to save, catalog, and share interesting pages they find online.

The Sociable plugin appends links for your readers to use those sites to the end of each of your blog’s posts, increasing your potential audience.

Thanks to Chris Kasten it now includes co.mments.

Another must-read from Anil Dash:

1. Skim just enough of the first few sentences so you can get a fair idea what the topic of a post or news item is.
2. Scroll quickly, as fast as you can! Be careful not to accidentally read any of the other comments on the page on the way down. (Some of them may contain the information you’re about to post.)
3. Type out whatever opinion you’ve had on this topic your entire life. Don’t waste time with spelling or punctuation, and be careful not to let any new information on the page influence your thoughts.

And do (at least this once) scroll down, there’s a few more gems in the comments.

_{Via Jeremy Zawodny’s linkblog}

I promised a site redesign, and I’m sure you noticed it’s not there yet. Here’s a short explanation of what’s going on.

I made a list of all the features you asked for. The feeds not always working as expected, new comments are hard to see on the tracking page, and past 20 or so conversations, the tracking page is hard to use. And not surprisingly, people have been asking for tags, and other ways to organize stuff.

I realized that there’s a lot in common to these problems, and it’s easier to come up with one solution that will address them, and make it easier to add more features in the future. It turns out that solution requires some significant changes to the way conversations are retrieved from the database, a change that could easily take a couple of weeks to develop and test.

So I’m working on that. Meanwhile, I’ve also switched my development machine from Windows to Linux. It’s easier to develop the code, test it and deploy it using the same setup as the server. So a few days spent setting up Linux, copying files from one computer to another, getting comfortable with the new machine.

Linux may be great for development, but the hardware support is a bit lacking. So I had to work around issues with the video driver, flakey wifi card and suspend/resume problems. Most of it fixed by now.

So I apologize for the delay, I’m definitely working on these new features, I just need a bit more time.

As a user of co.mments, you register for an account on the co.mments.com Web site so we can let you track comments wherever you go. If you want to start a new topic of discussion on the blog, you register on blog.co.mments.com. If you want to add content to the Wiki (with attribution), you register on wiki.co.mments.com.

What … a … pain.

I don’t like multiple registrations. People I know don’t like multiple registration. It’s annoying and confusing and wastes time. There must be a better way.

Does anyone have experience with WordPress and MediaWiki? I need a solution so users can register exactly once, and have accounts in all three services.

At MashupCamp I had a long discussion with Gabe Rivera. Gabe is the brilliant mind behind Memeorandum, my favorite memetracker.

I spent half an hour listening to Gabe convience me that user registration is evil, and I should get rid of it. He didn’t actually use the word evil, he just said a lot of things that made sense. And he’s right. There must be a better way.

His idea has been haunting me for the past couple of weeks. How do I get rid of user registration? How can I make co.mments useable without it?

Why user registration?

Let me first explain why we ask people to register in the first place. It’s not because we want to make your life harder. Comment tracking should be as simple as possible.

It’s not because we want your e-mail address. You already get more spam than you care for, which is why co.mments has a no-spam policy. We’re not here to bother you, we’re here to make your life easier.

We only ask for e-mail in case you forgot your password, so we can send you a new one. And right here is the prolem. You need to create a username and password, and then you need to remember to use them.

Why?

Let’s say you use Internet Explorer at work to track conversations. And then you go home and use Firefox on a different computer to track the same conversations. Or maybe you use a PDA or your cell phone. I use two browsers and a cell phone, so I have that problem.

Because they are all different browsers, there’s no easy way to identify you. To recognize when you are using co.mments so we can serve you the right conversations.

So user registration is inevitable, if you want to use different computers or different browsers.

Is this a problem for you?

A lot of people, like Gabe, don’t care. You use the same computer and browser all the time. Or you use co.mments for disposable feeds. For you, registration is a burden. No value.

So let’s say we get rid of user registration. You still use the bookmarklet to track new conversations. You still use your feed reader to follow the conversations. You can use the tracking page, all without ever logging in. It works because it recognizes your browser.

There’s a downside. You can’t use more than one computer or more than one browser to track the same conversations. If your computer crashes, it’s tricky to retrieve the conversations you’re already tracking.

So the best solution, is to let people register for an account if they need to, and let people use co.mments without registration if they want to. The best of both worlds.

So what’s the problem?

Say you do have an account, but you happen to be logged out. You bookmark a new conversation, which gets added to a tracking list associated with your browser, not your account. Then you log in, and … no conversation. Where did it go? What happened? How do you get it back?

That’s a problem. I think I have a solution, it’s not perfect, but it can help you retrieve the conversation. It will make life easier for people who don’t want to register, but might be tricky for those who do need an account. It’s been bugging me for a week, and I’m still working out the kinks.

Meanwhile, I want to get you all involved and hear what you think. Is this useful? Would it make your life better? Are you worried about losing conversations?

I’m taking a moment to thank co.mments users who helped improved the service. In not particular order.

Ryan King, one of the smartest developers I know, for helping with last minute fixes before launch, and Safari testing. And also for snark spicing our life.

Sylvain Briant for translating the introduction page to help our French users. And for contributing an idea that will be added in a future release.

Luisin did the first testing of the Blogger theme integration, then posted about it on his blog, and right here, for the benefit of our Spanish speakers.

Simone Carletti for telling Italian users about co.mments.

Thanks for all your help.

Thanks for letting me post on your site.  I hope that was intentional.
It would be really cool if there was some javascript or something I could execute in my blog’s code for submitting a new entry, that would automatically track comments made on the entry. I would know the URL for the comments page at that time.

Me ha costado, pero gracias a la ayuda de Asaf, creador del servicio, que además de tener la visión y la capacidad de montar un servicio genial ha resultado ser de lo más amable, ya he conseguido instalar el servicio en mi blog

Sólo teneis que copiar el primer bloque de codigo que hay en la url que enlazo abajo y saldrá un cuadradito de co.mments debajo de cada post. Cualquiera que haga click en ellos añadirá los comentarios del post a las conversaciones seguidas (requiere que vuestros lectores se den de alta en co.mments, pero no voy a perder tiempo explicando lo útil que es para seguir esos hilos que sabes van a ser interesantes pero no tienes tiempo de rastrear.

Ha escrito un post para que todos los que esteis atascados donde yo podais añadir la funcionalidad a vuestro Blog

Podeis verlo en Co.mments en Blogger

Thanks again Asaf! I hopes it helps any of your Spanish users which might be stuck…

I woke up this morning to find two complaints that co.mments is not working, and a server log that looks something like this:

SystemStackError: stack level too deep in http://someblog/…
SystemStackError: stack level too deep in http://someblog/…
SystemStackError: stack level too deep in http://someblog/…
SystemStackError: stack level too deep in http://someblog/…
SystemStackError: stack level too deep in http://someblog/…

And it just went on and on.

That was a bug from last week, but it only affected very few blogs, not all of them. And besides, I fixed it during the migration along with a few other improvements. Somehow it found its way back. I don’t know how.

It’s gone now. I hope for good. I also rolled in a few other improvements that will smooth things up.