June 28, 2007

Improving Great Dance Comment System

First, thanks for all of the great comments on a number of recent posts - especially, "How Do You Generate Movement?" I'll catch-up on posting follow-up comments to this and other posts in the next few days as the week-long dance program I'm taking wraps-up tomorrow.

Jaki Levy, a writer, designer and administrator for the Misnomer blog, recommended earlier in the week that I add an email notification tool to my comment system. That way when you post a comment to a post, you can get notified when others post comments to the same post.

I think that's an excellent idea. Over the summer I'll work on revamping the comment system so that:

- Once you register on Great Dance or on 3rd-party service, you'll be identified as a trusted commenter and your comments will appear automatically. (I currently review all comments manually before they are posted - I do this to avoid comment spam).

- I'll implement Jaki's idea and make it easy to subscribe to comments to specific posts so you receive email notifications.

- I'll create an RSS feed for comments. So if you prefer to read posts along with comments in your favorite RSS reader, you'll be able to do this.

- Also, Movable Type is now beta testing version 4 of their blogging/content management application. As soon as MT 4 is out of beta, I'll install it. Read/WriteWeb in a post about MT 4 mentions that this new version will included enhanced community features:

In effect this means that readers can become members of a website, with rights to post alongside authors - including sharing photos, videos, and audio. There is also a new ratings framework and later in the beta period more community features are promised.

I'm interested in exploring these new community features - especially multimedia posts by readers - to see what new functionality I can add to Great Dance so that there are new and expanded ways to share and contribute.

To digress a bit, there are a lot of excellent posts on a number of dance blogs that I haven't had time to write about. If you visit this post on Great Dance, I included instructions on how to subscribe to a large list of dance blogs.

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