In search of a comment (or, the great Danny Boyle re-tread scandal)

Some time ago, I pondered upping sticks and moving this blog to Blogger or WordPress or one of the others. I ummed and aahed. My reasons for moving? I wanted a nice blogroll and I wanted a decent commenting system. My reasons for holding back? I wanted to retain absolute control of how the blog looks, and I didn't want to be constrained by Terms & Conditions as to what I could include in a post. So I soldiered on as an independent, and found a way of producing a blogroll that met my exacting requirements. Happy days all round then.

Except the commenting thing really got to me. Don't get me wrong, I love it when someone comments, I really do. But the process of transferring that comment from your submission to its appearance on this page is painful and long-winded. First of all you get taken away from the blog, to a page that looks suspiciously like a generic contact form. Then you have to jump through lots of hoops, like filling in fields I probably don't need and reproducing a Captcha code. Then you get taken to what looks suspiciously like a generic thank-you form, and left to find your own way back to the blog. And that's only the start of it. I get a plain, vanilla email with your comment in it. I have to cut and paste bits of it, jiggle them around and encapsulate them in HTML to add them to the relevant post. Then I have to repeat the process but with XML for the comments RSS feed. Then I have to FTP both updated files to my host.

In short it's a faff, and a faff that had me on the verge of reconsidering my decision not to move to the whole shooting match to a proper blogging platform... In fact, I resumed my project of recreating the entire PipSpeak blog in Blogger. I got as far as 2010 - five years of posts - but gave up when I realised I couldn't embed an Amazon widget. Yes, I know you can put them in a sidebar gadget, but you can't in a post - you just get a big gap where your lovingly-crafted widget should be. And before you suggest WordPress or Tumblr or any of the others, from what I can see they have the same problem too.

Back to the drawing board then. How to make comments more natural for the user and less of a faff for me? I considered using Disqus as a third-party commenting system but there's too much CSS drama required to make it look how I would want it to within the site, so that was a no. Instead, I realised there was no choice but to write some code. So now you have a bespoke comments form that should open in a nice, discrete window of its own. There's a minimum of fields to complete, and no Captcha. If you have cookies enabled, the form will remember who you are for 31 days, so if you comment often (please do!) you shouldn't have to type your name and website in every time. And when you've hit "send" you get taken to an equally discrete and relevant thank-you form, with an easy "close" option, leaving you back at the blog post you started from. And for me, well, I let the form do some of the text-jiggling and HTML-wrangling for me. It's still a faff overall, but it's a little bit less so.

All I need now are some comments... so here's an idea I've been sitting on for nearly four years. Is Danny Boyle recycling his own films? Compare and contrast the opening sequences of Trainspotting (1996) and Slumdog Millionaire (2008), both shown below. Not the soundtrack, but the visuals. Does Danny have a "title sequence chase" check-box he likes to tick periodically? Paying homage to himself? What do you think?

And while you're busy commenting, do you prefer the new commenting "experience"?