Upcoming Features
Lots of people have been writing in to me with features they’d like to see here at the Cafes, especially with regard to the comment system. Some of these were already on my TODO list, but the site seemed to work and be useful now, so I didn’t want to wait to launch to implement absolutely everything. So herewith, in no particular order, is a peek at my TODO list:
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The Comments link should include number of Comments, e.g. Comments [9] or Comments [0].
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User options to see just the article, just the comments, or both on the same page. Possibly if I do this may move the post a comment form to a separate page.
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An option to reverse comment order, so you read comments in archeaelogical order, most recent comment on top.
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Editable comments, so posters can correct their spelling errors.
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Individual RSS feeds for each article’s comments.
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E-mail notification of new comments. Indeed perhaps full, 2-way comment mailing lists.
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Threaded comments.
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Printer friendly versions of comments pages.
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Better indication of which fields are required and which are optional in the forms.
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A privacy policy
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Referrers lists at the bottom of each page.
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A new article mailing list.
None of this is going to happen tomorrow. There are also a lot of changes I need to make that won’t necessarily be user visible. However, I do plan to get to all of this eventually. Anything else you’d like to see? Post it here.
By the way, I do plan to get back to more generic articles soon. The navel gazing of writing about this site on this site will not continue indefinitely. It’s just that I’m mostly interested in writing about what I’m working on, and what I’m working on right now is this site.
December 3rd, 2004 at 2:51 pm
E-mail notification
What did you have in mind here? I assume you mean that when user A comments on Elliotte’s entry, and then user B replies to user A, that both user A and Elliotte will receive an email notifying them of this fact. And that when Elliote replies to user B, user B will be notified of that, as will user A (on up the tree). The only blogging comment system I’ve used that truly seems to do this right is Livejournal. It is great because it keeps conversations going (otherwise they just tend to die out), and has the added benefit of creating an email archive of the conversation.
December 5th, 2004 at 8:47 am
I was thinking that one would have to subscribe to a page, and then would recieve all updates to that page in e-mail. I was also thinking that you could add a new comment simply by replying to the e-mail.
Perhaps it would also make sense to notify people of replies to their own posts by default.