Comment tracking competition, MAMP and WAMPANY development |
Loading ...I know others have left over the problems but I’ve stayed with cocomment. I also signed up with their competitor co.mments and have used their bookmarklet a few times, but I’m sort of loyal in a way to those swiss guys who brought us to the dance.
Recently cocomment started adding easy tagging for comments. When you click on bookmarklet in the browser a little form window pops up for the tag and you can tag at the same time. I still see that other popup window mentioned in the link at the start of this post and that almost had me abandon them too.
A User Interface lesson learned
Make it convenient, they’ll start using it. I didn’t really question this when the box popped up (no upgrade needed, it happened automatically), I just started utilyzing it like a good comment soldier. This will make it easier finding past comments on certain topics later. Hope it will, anyway. I just looked at my recent tag cloud and saw that spaces were creating additional words so when I was using “xbox 360″ it was making two separate tags. Not what I intended, doh! So how do you make multiple words? If I try to put in + it backspaces and deletes as I type it, so don’t know on that one.
As far as functionality goes co.mments seems to work more reliably when you click the bookmarklet than cocomment but when I visited co.mments today I had difficulty locating where all the conversations I was tracking were located (???). I saw the RSS feed, so it dumps them all there by default?
Developer environments
The developer of co.mments has a list of features planned to be added where he also adds that he switched development from Windows to Linux:
I’ve also switched my development machine from Windows to Linux. It’s easier to develop the code, test it and deploy it using the same setup as the server. So a few days spent setting up Linux, copying files from one computer to another, getting comfortable with the new machine.Linux may be great for development, but the hardware support is a bit lacking. So I had to work around issues with the video driver, flakey wifi card and suspend/resume problems. Most of it fixed by now.
For web development I use primarily Windows boxes and then FTP to Linux-based servers. On the Mac recently I learned of a very exciting project called MAMP. This is great for running MySQL, Apache and PHP locally. Also has PHPMyAdmin baked in. If I had iBook or one of those Powerbooks, I’d spend more offline time using an app like this because it makes local development for the web a snap. I don’t have a solution similar to this for Windows, do any of the development readers have a good suggestion for a similar app like MAMP for Windows? WAMPANY looks like the ticket, but it’s all in French. The only French I took was in high school and I’m not confident Babelfish would do a good job translating something like that. Any ideas?
Back to loyalty
The other reason I’ve kept using cocomment is because it builds a presence in one place. This importance shouldn’t be understated when looking at the bigger picture of why anybody would want to share their comments with a third party tracking service. Despite what some might think commenting on other blogs is a subtle (or not so subtle in the case of spammers) form of advertising and branding. Even if you don’t leave a URL — and sometimes I don’t or can’t because some comment systems don’t allow it — any place you sign your name on the web gets your name out there. I’m not advocating being a commenting spammer — I despise those bastards — so don’t get me wrong here, I’m just talking about the things you would normally want to comment on and when there is a chance to leave your URL in the sig tag to always do so, especially if the site isn’t rel=nofollowing your URL.
Conversely, be careful about leaving URLs in the comment post area without an invitation from the author. For example, Hmm is pretty relaxed about people leaving related URLs in their posts here, however if it isn’t related we reserve the right — and do — remove some URLs from the post body (and even signature area). It’s nothing personal if it ever happens to anybody who leaves a comment, we just want to keep the content of the page relevant. Since we don’t use rel=nofollow we believe this gives us license to alter the URLs linked from these pages. If you don’t think a link off these pages helps your site, just ask the people behind the 250-500+ comment spams who pound this site daily trying to punch through. They sure believe it will help them which makes it all the more fun to delete them before they ever see daylight.
I find that red x thing to be maddening at times (it still doesn’t work on your blog, Sterling, grrr) and it hasn’t completely gone away, but I like how easy cocomment makes the information organized and simple to follow from the web or from RSS.
Related Posts- Tracking comments on multiple blogs with CoComment
- Cocomment red x syndrome?
- Why Linux on Tablet PC?
- [site news] Gettin’ there … to Wordpress
- Blog comment spam and SE impact: is it that significant?
- Dude, where’s my comments?
On Windows I installed Apache, MySQL and PHP for Windows. I installed them separately, it only takes an hour. I did use the Ruby one-click installer, which comes with MySQL and mod-ruby DLLs that are otherwise painful to build. That way I could setup Apache/MySQL to run as services, and run my own Wiki locally.
Separately, I installed Cygwin, which has the command line support, SSH, Rsync, SVN, etc and it’s own versions of the above. If you want to start Apache/MySQL on demand, I would recommend using the Cygwin ones. That process is also not very painful.
If you want to keep the development machine and server synchronized, rsync is easier than FTP and works great over SSH. In my case I prefer pushing releases out there and being able to rollback, so I use SVN instead.
Comment by Assaf — April 8, 2006 @ 3:44 pm PST
PS to answer your question, until tags show up (often requested, so expect it), all your conversations are put in one place. The tracking page is http://co.mments.com/track, and it’s “bring it to me” side is the feed.
Comment by Assaf — April 8, 2006 @ 4:12 pm PST
Hi Assaf - that doesn’t seem to show all the conversations I’ve captured with the co.mments bookmarklet. It shows only one when I know there should be at least a half dozen. Might want to check into that …
(probably 2 now, since I just marked this thread)
Comment by TDavid — April 8, 2006 @ 4:27 pm PST
If you have an account, don’t forget to check that you’re logged in when bookmarking or checking on conversations.
If this a problem with your RSS feed … I’m working on that.
Comment by Assaf — April 9, 2006 @ 4:13 am PST
Hi Assaf - if the error was because I wasn’t logged in then why would the bookmarklet be returning the message that it has “successfully” tracked the conversation? Tracked it for who and why? And no, I’m talking about the web, not the RSS feed.
It is tracking this thread good though
Comment by TDavid — April 9, 2006 @ 4:37 am PST
It turns out a lot of people don’t want to bother setting up and account and log in. So for the past two weeks, we’ve been running with this feature and collecting feedback from users. If you have an account and are logged in, all the conversations are added to your account, and you can use it anywhere.
If you don’t have an account, or don’t login, all the conversations are still tracked based on your browser. You can only view them from your browser, when you are logged off. It turns out to be quite a useful feature.
More info:
http://blog.co.mments.com/2006/03/19/comments-with-and-without-registration/
Comment by Assaf — April 9, 2006 @ 4:47 am PST
Assaf - maybe I’m not being clear here, sorry. I know how to login and I am pretty sure I was logged in all this time. When I visit co.mments I see “welcome back tdavid” so that tells me I’m logged in and yet for the past few weeks all the conversations have in fact not been added to my account and I can’t use it everywhere. I suggest running an audit on my account and seeing what activity is there.
If you only show the two comments threads I’ve bookmarked then something went wrong. One of those two threads is from yesterday — this thread. That isn’t accurate considering I’ve bookmarked at least a dozen threads over the same period of time at cocomment. What I’ve done is click both bookmarklets in the toolbar. If I’m not logged in then your system should report back clearly — “not logged in” — so that the user realizes they need to login to have this tracked.
Hopefully this is more clear, yes/no?
Comment by TDavid — April 9, 2006 @ 5:25 am PST
Hey TDavid, thanks for linking. cocomment.com has some site requirements in javascript that I haven’t had time to implement in order to get my site working with their service. Actually, I did implement it once upon a time and it didn’t seem to work, and I never chased it any further.
I’ve seen the same thing with co.mments, and chalked it up to the “not logged in” syndrome — correctly or not I’m not sure. I wish there was a bookmarklet option of some sort that would disable the anonymous feature. Maybe a different script for that case, Assaf?\
For cross-platform development, I use Samba to access UNIX drives from Windows. Source archives are kept on the UNIX drive, and a build on either platform will optionally extract updates (using a cross-platform version of PVCS).
For web development, though, I’m afraid I still use good ole FTP. That is, when I’m not still publishing via FrontPage (ugh!).
Comment by Sterling Camden — April 10, 2006 @ 1:59 pm PST
David, let’s do this by e-mail. I want to figure out how to solve this problem, but I’m travelling right now, e-mail would be a easier. Can you e-mail me the details and I’ll check the server logs?
Comment by Assaf — April 11, 2006 @ 1:33 am PST
Assaf - you got all my details right here, except you aren’t getting my name right, which is one major detail wrong right off the bat.
Comment by TDavid — April 11, 2006 @ 7:36 am PST
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Pingback by Make You Go Hmm: » Hmmcast #3: Calendars, academics, hybrids and butt equations — April 14, 2006 @ 12:54 pm PST
I added some explanations about the red x problem here http://www.makeyougohmm.com/20060304/3022/#comment-68096 — hth.
Comment by Steph — April 15, 2006 @ 3:49 am PST
I have a suggestion for MAMP-like app for Windows.Try JSAS(Joomla Stand-Alone Server)It’s Apache,MySQL,PHP+Joomla CMS.
Comment by Pedja — November 21, 2006 @ 4:26 am PST
XAMPP - that’s what you wanted.
http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp-windows.html
Comment by Simon — January 16, 2008 @ 7:13 am PST