Ok, this is sweet. Short story for the impatient: CoComment is now fully supported on this blog, and everything works the way it should! :)

Long story for the curious: The issues that I described in my previous post were due to one basic fact - there was too much guesswork involved in harvesting the necessary information. Different blogs and blogging engines have different naming schemes and ways of passing data around. Coming up with a way to selectively extract information based on the type of blog is tricky, and even then, it may pick up incomplete or incorrect information if the author has made some changes to their template, as we noticed.

Eliminating the guesswork, as you might guess, makes the process much more reliable. Merlin from the CoComment team decided that one way to do this would be to ask blog authors to explicitly define a set of variables in a JavaScript block that contain most of the information the CoComment bookmarklet needs to complete its task successfully. Of course, the values for these variables can be dynamically generated using PHP, ASP etc. For more information on how to implement this, take a look at this post on the CoComment TeamBlog.

So basically, what did I do to make this blog work with CoComment? First, I had to change the naming convention of the comment form to match the one used by TypePad, which is just one of the many blogging engines already supported by CoComment. That was what I did yesterday to get the basic functionality working. Now to fix the "untitled" problem and the clumping issue, I had to explicitly define variables that store the blog title, the post title, and the complete URL, including the unique post identifier, so that the bookmarklet could extract this information. Since the guesswork had been eliminated, everything worked perfectly. :)

So go ahead - leave a comment, and test it out if you want.

Update:CoComment is now fully supported on this blog. See the next post for more information.
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In my earlier post, I mentioned that the comments system on this blog was not compatible with CoComment.

Well, it looks like I've made some progress. If you use the bookmarklet now, you should notice the little CoComment icon appearing next to the submit button. Submitting the comment will, in fact, add it to your CoComment tracker! :) But there are a couple of problems.

Firstly, you'll notice that the blog title appears as "untitled" in your tracker. A number of other blogs seem to be having the same problem, and it has to do with the way the blog and post titles are extracted from the page. The CoComment devs are looking for a better way to handle this.

The second problem arises from the fact that I don't have separate post pages on this blog. Because of this, only the name of the page (for example, 2006_02_01_archives.php) is extracted as the post URL, and the unique post ID that's passed as an argument is ignored. The effect is that if you left a comment under this post, and another comment under the post before this one, they would both be clumped together in your CoComment tracker as if both comments were made in response to a single post, which is obviously not the case. Interestingly enough, the CoComment team blog has the same problem, so I'm hoping it'll be fixed soon. If they can find a way to extract the entire URL, including the unique post ID, that should do it. I've reported this on their forum, explaining the situation.

So basically, if you decide to use the bookmarklet with this blog, keep in mind that you'll see comments on your tracker that have nothing to do with the comments you posted or the posts they were in response to. What you'll essentially end up with, for the moment, is a list containing any and all comments posted to this blog in a given month, which is probably better than having nothing at all, but I'm just letting you know in advance. :)

Oh, and if you find that you're forgetting to click the bookmarklet before submitting comments, check out the Automatic CoComment script for Greasemonkey. It auto-discovers compatible comment forms, so you don't have to remember to click the bookmarklet each time. Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension, but IE users should be able to use Trixie for the same purpose with the same script (not tested yet).

Remember the post about a Flip3D clone coming for XP? Looks like it's here. So the latest version of TopDesk includes functionality that mimics both Exposé from OS X and Flip3D from Vista on a Windows XP system.

I haven't tried it yet, but the videos look pretty impressive.

I wrote about 30 Boxes, a new web-based calendaring system, on Friday.

If you go to the site now, you'll notice that it prompts you for a username and password before you can proceed. Enter the username "beta" and password "tester" (without the quotes, of course) to login with the test/sample account.

Once you're in, you can sign up for your own account if you're interested in using it. :)

Scoble posts about a new service called CoComment that lets you keep track of all the comments that you make on other blogs that you read, and any other responses that may follow.

It's a great idea. I tend to lose track of comments that I leave sometimes, and this looks like a nice way to have one single, centralized place to keep track of all of them and follow up if necessary.

It's currently an invite-only beta. I managed to sign up with a code, so I'll be trying it out soon.

Update: I just posted my first comment on Brandon's blog using this. It's pretty straightforward. You fill out the comments form as you normally would, click the CoComment bookmarklet, and submit the form. The comment then automatically gets added to your CoComment account.

You can find my comments page here. Yeah, being one of the first few users, I managed to grab the username "Kunal" before anyone else could this time. :)

Also, if you do get an account, it won't work with this blog yet. I don't use the standard Blogger comment system. CoComment currently only works with Blogger, MSN Spaces, MySpace, TypePad, Wordpress and Xanga blogs. I might be able to make it work with this blog once they make the necessary tools available.