Comments Working...

And you ask what kind of news is that? Comments have been working on asisaid since November 2002, months before it was even asisaid, right? Yes. But they weren't working in my next generation blogging software. Now the software properly retrieves comments from its database — the only thing left to do concerning commenting is setup a way to add new comments.

After I complete that, I may try to write a script to pull the data out of the encoded text files that the blog is in now and move it into the new script's SQL database. Of course, some things are still missing in the new code base — trackback support being the biggest of those features. On the other hand, it supports searching previous posts, which is nice.

At the point that I get the code operational, it will be the first significant modification to my blog's code since the aforementioned addition of comments and a more traditional layout and navigation system two years ago next week. I really need to do this — with the plain text file that stores the actual entries growing to over a megabyte in size, it is no longer efficient by any means. To draw the front page, the script must work through that whole megabyte of entries plus read the complete text of the last 15 posts' comments and trackback files so that it can generate the numbers of comments and trackbacks that go under the title. SQL can do all this much more efficiently.

More importantly, asisaid is going to become a test bed of this software for OfB. In the end I'd like to nuke PHP-Nuke and switch OfB over to this new system as well (for security reasons).