phil ringnalda

Les was, understandably, perplexed about a comment claiming to be from Dave Winer (since in his circles, SOAP, XML-RPC, and anything Dave’s ever done are unutterably evil, and by saying that XML-RPC really worked pretty well for him Les was standing up in the Communist Party meeting and shouting “Capitalism has produced some pretty nice cars and computers!”), but what caught my attention more was “a comment claiming to come from.” I’ve had that same feeling.

That was the part of the spam comments tempest that caught pb’s attention, and now he gives you the option of PGP-signing your comments on his weblog. I quite like the idea, and I suspect it will appeal to Ben as well, but I’m not enough of a technology forecaster to say when the average commenter will be able to casually sign a block of text.

In the meantime, I was thinking to myself that the only way you really know that a particular comment actually came from the person who claims to have left it is if they also blog the same thoughts, or better yet if they TrackBack from a post rather than comment, when the light bulb lit up: if you treat post-to-post TrackBacks as what they really are, remote comments, and display them intermixed with local comments, and if you further don’t limit the length of the remote comment text, then everybody who runs a weblog that does TrackBack could just have a separate blog or category for their remote comments. Wondering whether that post with the letters D-a-v-e W-i-n-e-r below it is something he wrote? Click the link to see whether the same text appears on scripting.com/remoteComments/. As an added bonus, you get to compose your comment in your choice of editor, rather than whatever tiny textarea the site owner offers.

While a weblog of out-of-context comments wouldn’t be especially readable on its own, it would be interesting to know where people you like to read are engaged enough to comment themselves, and having a page with my comments linked to the threads would be invaluable to me: I haven’t got a clue how often I’ve left a comment, thinking that I’d remember to go back, when in fact I almost never do. I’d love to have a home page sidebar of the RSS feed from my remote comment weblog, reminding me about threads I want to revisit, especially if I could easily and temporarily subscribe to a feed from the thread itself at the same time, so I could distinguish between threads with replies after mine and ones that are quiet.

Let’s see, hack MT to intermingle TrackBacks and comments (I’ve got a nearly complete PHP/MySQL workaround to avoid having MT do it statically, but that won’t sell in general), hack the TrackBack client to send the full post, the TrackBack server to accept the full post (with safe HTML), figure a way to distinguish between remote-comment TrackBacks and TrackBack TrackBacks, … might not get this done tonight.