I used to think that blogs were interesting because they represented an individual's raw voice unfiltered by editors and undisturbed by distractions. Thus I saw the introduction of comments into blogs as a weird adaptation from the land of forums. Pings and trackbacks seemed like a much better way for people to carry on a conversation in the blogosphere.

Unfortunately my characteristically Betamax instinct was on the money yet again, as it turns out that most of the people I want to carry on a conversation with aren't interested in the distributed computing showcases. When combined with the constant chiding that I take in the office for a) writing ridiculous things in this blog and b) not providing a vehicle for talking back, I've finally been worn down to a nubble. As of tonight, this blog is now commentable.

As always, I have to give credit to the wonderful Django framework (and it's sparsely documented Freecomment sub-framework), along with the very useful comment-utils (from James at the B-List) which provides Akismet filtering and basic moderation in a nice and transparent way. Trackbacks may not have won the day, but it's nice to see that web services like Akismet are now used as simply and plainly as one might have used a third-party library two years ago.

So if you're an RSS-only reader, hit the V key and come visit, stay for a while, and leave a comment or two.

Just not the guy who used to comment on my last blog— I don't know what V-ONE-AGRA is, but I don't think I need it...