Comments
Yesterday was a long day. I was sleepy and not really on top of things and feeling slightly ill all day. Late in the afternoon, my computer started doing something that's become more and more common lately: the fans started making a lot of noise. (The cooling fans. The sf fans always make a lot of noise, but they're not in my computer.) They get noisier and noisier as (presumably) the computer gets hotter, and at some point they often start making stuttering noises much like, well, broken fans. (There may actually be only one fan, I'm not sure. But it's as noisy as several noisy fans.) (Though not as several noisy sf fans.)
Do I have a point yet? Okay, right: I did what I usually do to cool the computer down: put it to sleep for a little while. But when I woke it up, maybe half an hour later, the fans immediately got noisy again. So I figured I'd stop by the Apple Store on the way home and see if they could do anything.
But when I got there, the fans refused to act up. The genius at the genius bar suggested that I sit and use the computer for a while, doing what I'd normally do, connecting to the Net via their Airport network, stressing the processor and the disk. So I sat and did that. I ended up spending something like an hour and a half sitting in the Apple Store, unsuccessfully trying to get the fans to act up. (It's actually pretty likely that they did get noisy, but they didn't reach the broken-sounding stage, and the store was too loud to tell whether the fans were noisy or not.)
So I had to do something while I was there. I couldn't read subs; the store was too noisy. I couldn't edit, for the same reason. I'd read all the forums and journals I was going to read, and all the war news I could deal with. The only thing left for it was to install a comments system.
I figured I'd leave it unannounced for the moment and see how long it took for anyone to notice it. Turns out it took only about eight and a half hours from the time I finished installing it and posting an entry (I took a long break in the middle of the setup to go home, eat dinner, and do assorted other stuff), and during most of that period all my likely readers were asleep. Jon wins the prize for first person to notice and comment. Thanks, Jon!
I'm trying an experiment: the main page, showing the most recent entries, doesn't show how many comments there are if there aren't any. If there are comments, they'll be listed next to the title. I think this will lead to a cleaner look, without a long line of "(0 comments)"; we'll see.
It should be very easy to add this system to Vardibidian's journal, but I figured I'd iron out any bugs here first.
An aside to LJ readers: this comment system is completely unconnected to LJ's comment system. If you post comments at LJ, chances are I still won't see them. Yes, LJ sends email to the owner of a journal when you post a comment to that journal; but my journal on LJ isn't a regular LJ journal, it's a "syndicated" account, and as far as LJ is concerned I'm not associated with it in any way. So I'm afraid if you want to post comments that I'll actually see, you need to come to my actual journal pages. Sorry about that.
