The official coComment weblog

Although this new release of Firefox is a major step forward in term of features and performance, it does not come without issues. We were, we confess, more than a little surprised to find that it was not backwards compatible. We’ve been monitoring the development over the last months and hoping that this would be fixed BUT, as we all now know, that did not happen and the final release is not fully backward compatible with Firefox 2.

There are two areas we are working on right now:

- Support for our extension: FF3 introduces a new security mechanism for extensions. We have adapted our code to support this and we will release a FF3 compatible extension very soon.

- Javascript issues: Our service, like many others, makes extensive usage of browser side Javascript. FF3 introduced new rules enforcement as well as major modifications in some basic APIs (like JSON). We are currently working on adapting our code whilst still keeping it compatible with other browsers. We will keep you informed on the progress of this task.

This means that, right now, you will almost certainly experience compatibility issues with coComment if used with Firefox Version 3. We would therefore recommend that you DO NOT UPGRADE yet.

If you absolutely need to use Firefox 3 then you can still use the coComment bookmarklet bookmarklet to capture your comments.

Please stay tuned for more news.

We are now taking down our service for a maintenance.

We will try to keep this operation as short as possible.

Sorry for the inconvenience

Christophe.

We have started the migration to coComment V2.

The initial step consists of a huge update of our live database.

Although this does not affect the functionalities of the current production site running coComment V1, you might experience some slow response times from the service.

We apologize for the inconvenience, but it is worth it !

Christophe

We’re at Innovate Europe this week telling everyone about coComment.

Have met several sites that have now decided to integrate with coComment so expect to see a very rapid rise in the number of conversations available to you on coComment.

We’re also delighted to welcome SevenLoad to coComment … great video content and some very funny conversations too Sevenload Conversations.

Finally, please drop us a line and tell us how you like the new discover and search facilities. Are they what you want to help you find people, sites and conversations ? What else do you want ?

Cheers,

Matt.

Here we are! The page explaining how to integrate coComment into your blog has just been updated. You’ll see some changes in the javascript integration code — but not to worry, the old code still works.

Let me take this occasion to clarify again what this whole “integration” thing is about. When coComment captures comments left on blogs, it needs to catch all sorts of information: blog name and URL, comment author’s name, comment content, etc. Clicking on the bookmarklet or using the extension tells coComment to do that.

When coComment is integrated into a blog, two things happen:

• the different variables coComment needs are given to it directly
• coComment is given the power to catch the comments.

Consequence: if you integrate coComment into your blog, coComment will have the correct data (blog and post names, etc.) and will know to capture the comments made on it, be they by coComment users or other people.

If you don’t integrate coComment into your blog, then we still try and catch the comments (if a coComment user requests it by posting in the thread or simply choosing to track it) with the coCo-crawler. This is, however, a less precise way of capturing comments for the moment.

technorati tags:cocomment, integration, explanation

Specially for you today, something that will make tagging comments really useful: feeds by user and tag. Let’s look at an example together to see how it works.

First, a reminder: you already know you can subscribe to a user’s comments or the conversations that user has participated in. For that, you use the RSS feed links that are displayed on every user’s page. For example, mine look like this:

• conversations: http://cocomment.com/rss2/steph.rss
• comments: http://cocomment.com/myrss2/steph.rss

You can also subscribe to comments identified by a given tag. This has been around for a while, but for some reason the link to the feed wasn’t visible on the page. It is now. Thus, to subscribe to comments tagged “coComment” you would use the following feed:

• comments tagged “coComment”: http://cocomment.com/rss2Tag/cocomment.rss

OK so far? Ready for the juicy part? How about subscribing to all the comments one user makes on a particular topic, identified by a tag? For example, maybe you don’t care much about the comments I usually make, but you want to keep an eye on the comments I tag “coComment”. If you’re on somebody’s conversations page (or yours!) and you click on a tag there, you’ll see an extra feed (labeled “Tag”) in the user feeds. For example:

• Steph’s comments tagged “coComment”: http://cocomment.com/rss2Tag/cocomment/steph.rss

Pretty neat! But we didn’t stop there. We’ve added a little extra special something for when you want to subscribe to your own tags. You see, subscribing to my own comments tagged “superimportant” isn’t going to be very useful. It would be much more interesting if you could subscribe to the conversations in which you once used a given tag, wouldn’t it?

Well, you can do just that. If you go to your own user page, click on a tag, and subscribe to the “Tag” user feed you find there, you’ll see that it actually subscribes you to the conversations in which you used that tag.

This opens up all sorts of exciting doors about using tags (and creating tags!) to track certain conversations and not others. I have that problem all the time: I leave comments all over the place, but I’m not as interested in tracking certain conversations as I am others. For me, it’s really important to track my conversations tagged “coComment” seriously, so I’ll subscribe to this feed and check it regularly:

• Steph’s conversations tagged “coComment”: http://cocomment.com/rss2/cocomment/steph.rss (to be precise: conversations in which I posted a comment tagged “coComment”)

I could also use another tag called “important” or “priority” to label conversations I want to track more actively than the usual chatter that I just check once in a while on my conversations page. (I’m not doing it yet, but writing all this is making me realise this is the solution to my conversation overload problems!)

What about you? How do you like the new tag/user feeds? Are you using tags to help you track your conversations better? Share your experiences with your fellow coCommenters in the comments.

Happy tagging!

technorati tags:feeds, tagging, cocomment, users, tags, explanation, features, links

How do you use the "Conversations" page? When do you visit it? Do you visit it at all? I find myself going there pretty infrequently, and the links I click on most are the little grey boxes on the right which take me to the blog article I’ve commented upon. What about you?

Do you use the other links? How often? What links would you like to have on that page?

What about the RSS feed? Are you happy with the links it provides?

technorati tags: comments, links, rss, feed, usability

We just published some updates in the Your conversations page, mostly changing the order of the sidebar elements. We hope it will be more usable like that.

There is also a new homepage that will make it clear coComment’s registrations are now open, free, and don’t require any code! Open your account if you haven’t done yet!

We will now work on the navigation with the help of our information architect, to simplify your experience on cocomment.com. If you have some ideas and suggestions don’t hesitate