Testing the comments

Haloscan is becoming something called Echo, a much more complicated system that is no longer free. I thought about using the free comment system that comes with Blogger. That has its own problems. Rather than using one of the Blogger templates for archy, I built my own. To enable the Blogger comments, I first need to incorporate their code into my template, and to do that I need to deconstruct their code to pick out the parts I need. That will take some time.

Here's my plan. I'm building another site, that I plan to launch in a few weeks. Once I figure out enough code to make it run smoothly, I'll revamp archy to use the same code. In the meantime, I've paid Echo their lousy ten dollars to use their comments. They turned it on today, so commenting should be functional by now.

Looks like I'm going to use a sizeable chunk of my day today getting Echo set up to my satisfaction. This would go a lot smoother if they had any help on their site. Like far too many companies, Echo has no end user documentation that I can find. Instead, they have a "community" where confused users get to try to figure things out by themselves. Meanwhile, hundreds of experienced documentation writers are unemployed in this economy (like Clever Wife or me). I could bang out complete help files for a product like this in a little over a week.

If anyone wants to be a beta tester, make a comment and tell me what it looked like from your end (either by another comment or by e-mail if the comments were too difficult to use.