ACME Comments Weblet

What It Is

This little doohickey lets you add a commenting facility to any of your web pages. I wrote it to use on my own pages, but it's general enough to work for anyone. You don't have to run any special weblogging software to have commenting, you can just outsource it.

When you set it up, you get a link on your page saying how many comments there are. If someone clicks on the link, they see the comments and get a form where they can enter a new comment. And if you have your email address on your page, then whenever someone enters a comment you get notification by mail.

Try It

Here's an example, for commenting on this page:

How To Use It

It's real easy. First add this HTML code to your page, to load the routines:

<script src="//acme.com/javascript/acme.namespace.jsm" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="//acme.com/javascript/acme.utils.jsm" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="//acme.com/comments/acme.comments.jsm" type="text/javascript"></script>
    

Then, where you want the comments link to appear, add this HTML:

<comments></comments>
    

That's it! Everything else happens automatically. If you prefer valid HTML over good-looking HTML, you can also use <span class="comments">. Either will work, and you can use any element, not just <span>. Also, if you want to refer to comments on another page, you can add a url="" attribute. This is unusual, typically you just let it figure out the URL by itself.

Questions

I don't want the emailed notifications, can I turn them off for me?

Well, you could take your address off the page. Aside from that, no, sorry. Maybe I'll add a customization settings page later. For now I guess you could use a spam filter to get rid of the messages.

I do want the emailed notifications, but I'm not getting them; why not?

Maybe your email address on the page is not in the proper HTML format? It should be something like this:

<address><a href="mailto:someone@some.where">Your Name Here</a></address>

The key parts are "address", "href", and "mailto".

Can I delete comments?

No. Again, maybe I'll add that later.

Is there any security on the names and email addresses?

Nope. Anyone can pretend they are you. You can give a fake name and address, or none at all if you like. Don't believe anything you see here. Or anywhere else on the net, for that matter.

Hey, it remembered my name and email from last time. Are you cookieing me???

You bet. This is exactly the kind of thing that cookies are supposed to be used for.

What the heck is a weblet?

I needed a name for a little web application that gets embedded in another page. I googled for 'weblet' and people were using the term, but not in any consistent way. So I decided to use it for this. Some people also call them 'pagelets', but I don't like that because the word looks ugly, plus there's more going on here than just a page.

ACME Labs / Comments Weblet