Kottke Komments
At last year's SXSW, Jason Kottke mentioned that he did not want to enable comments on his site because, amongst other reasons, managing the huge community of readers would take too much of his time. Powered by BBQ and an animal desire to parody everything I see, I registered the domain "kottkekomments.com," mostly as a joke.
Everyone loves alliteration.
Well, this evening, I found a few spare brain cycles and finally launched the site! It's not even a joke. Powered by Jason's CC licensed RSS feeds and some custom software I wrote (mostly consisting of freely available software libraries woven together in clever ways), the readers of kottke.org can now discuss, amend or otherwise comment upon Jason's writing and links. Who knows if it will find an audience -- I don't even know where to begin to find readers of Jason's site -- but it was fun to build and, I hope, will end up turning itself into something interesting. Maybe some of Jason's readers will find it and meet each other through the comments and realize that they are neighbors and OMG have so much in common, and then have kinky sex in the laundry room while screaming, "KOTTKE! KOTTKE! KOTTKE!"
Or maybe not. But a man can dream, can't he?
Without further ado... Komment on Kottke!
A brief side note to those in my small audience here on Vox that might care: Man, oh man, writing software is so much easier today than it was a few years ago. I mean, I know we've had all of our "web 2.0" advances and all of that, but I'm speaking more of the high quality open source projects like CPAN that have really matured. Whereas in the past I would have used home-brewed solutions, this time I used an existing RSS parser, RSS generator, and HTML template system. I even used TypeKey for authentication. All told, 300 lines of code power the site -- which, before you suggest it, is already built to parse, combine, and remix multiple sources of content. BoingBoingBlurbs, anyone?
Comments
I think it is an interesting idea, something useful for many sites.