Alternative Comment System

I spotted something that I found neat today. A blogger named Wulf recently devised a system for tracking blog comments, without using any native comment system.

He uses the Blosxom blogging system that doesn’t (as far as I can tell) natively support comments. Additionally, any system for keeping track of comments is prone to being inundated with spammers. So when Wulf decided that he wanted comments for his blog he decided to use a comment system that he already knew about: Flickr Photo Comments.

The way it works is rather simple:

  1. You create a post for your blog.
  2. You then pull down a list of your photos using the Flickr API.
  3. You associate one photo with the particular post.
  4. You then add each Flickr Photo URL to the bottom of your post, as a way of commenting.

For example, here’s a post from his blog, and here’s the associated comment page.

There are a couple things that I like about this technique in particular: It completely kills the comment spam problem – leaving that to Flickr, it brings more views and comments to your Flickr photos, and it uses a system for an unintended purpose. All in all, I really dig it. I hope that he chooses to build a plugin out of it, as I think others would really enjoy using something like that.

Update: More discussion on reddit.

Posted: October 5th, 2006

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