Hacking the .mac Commenting System

Thursday, 2006-08-31; 03:27:00



Since enetation has become really, really slow lately and they haven't been supporting it at all anymore, I'm ready to jump commenting systems. I'm considering HaloScan, which seems to offer many of the same features that enetation does. It's $12/yr, though, to get ads out of the comments. The only sticking point is that there doesn't seem to be a way to import any comments -- only export them. (This is kind of useless, because if you can't import comments, what's the point of being able to export them? Certainly not for my life's archives.)

The other possibility is to somehow integrate .mac's commenting system. If you missed it, iWeb 1.1 supports comments in weblogs, using a commenting system right on .mac. The main advantage to using .mac is that it would allow me to do a little more with JavaScript and the commenting system -- as an example, I would be able to embed comments in the entries here since the comments would be hosted on the same domain as my weblog and therefore wouldn't be subject to JavaScript security restrictions.

.mac commenting would have some significant downsides, though, like not having nearly as much control over appearance and functionality. (Comment importing into the .mac system would almost certainly fail unless I made a script to iterate through each of the exported comments from enetation and add them into the .mac system.) I'm not sure if I could conjure something up with live preview, smilies, etc., that enetation offers me now.

But I still would like to have the option of using .mac commenting, if at the very least to explore the limits of how I would be able to modify it to suit my needs. The problem is that the system seems to be very closed and there's no obvious way to use the comment system other than through iWeb.

Is there anybody out there who could tinker around with an iWeb site and attempt to figure out the system? There's a bit of a start in this forum thread. A sample iWeb weblog with .mac commenting turned on is available here.

Any hacking would be greatly appreciated. :)

[EDIT: "Hacking" substituted for "cracking" for pedantic purposes at the behest of a nitpicking friend. Apologies if your RSS reader marks this entry as new again.]


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