Experimental
Last couple of days I've been including my comments on Flickr photos as part of the regular site and main RSS feed. If there was just a straight feed of comments I make, this would be easy, but instead, I take them from an RSS feed of comments made on photos on which I've made a comment. (Not really sure if that's supposed to be a quasi-private feed, but there it is.) (Oh, and why is there no public HTML representation available for that?) That feed includes comments made by others subsequent to the comments I make, so I filter those out. I've had one complaint about including Flickr comments, so we'll see how it goes over the next few days, but one of the points I'm trying to make is that comments are often "just" a weblog article posted on someone else's site. And that there needs to be some sort of distributed authenticated commenting system with an RSS for everything.
For those wondering why I don't integrate my del.icio.us links in the main site and feed, believe me, I want to. For now they appear on the sidebar of the HTML version of the site, with the tags for each link and a permanent link of sorts—which shows my link, tags and commentary as well as those of others who link to the same thing—for each link.
The reason I'm pointing all that out is because Just a Gwai Lo is a pretty long-running experiment in what's possible with web technologies and services. It's held pretty tightly with duct tape (aka PHP) and RSS and at least 3 CMS's. I just want to make the fact that it's an experiment and always will be a little more official by announcing that fact. Again.
Darren calls these things "Boring Site Notes". As is I'm sure obvious by now, I could go on and on about this kind of thing, and am more inclined to comment on Darren's weblog when he makes note of changes to his site.
