Time Immortal

This new idea with the contact form has generated some interesting — and enjoyable — results, so the experiment will continue for the time being. Who else will write in as the weeks roll on, I wonder?

I just wanted to say, though, that I’ve finally managed to chop up the comments form properly, so any articles which had previously had comments posted to them will now display those comments again (without displaying the “post a comment” form afterwards). This is mostly a “for posterity” thing, O Reader, but I figured that one or two of you out there might find it useful.

Humour me for a minute.

Or a week. Whatever.

I’ve temporarily deactivated comments on the Time Immortal. Now, one or two people might actually be upset about this; I don’t know. Robert probably feels vindicated and thinks I’m running away before the superior might of his atheistic reason. Erf might be thinking that he’ll miss what was shaping up to be an engaging discussion. Neither mode of thinking would be entirely correct (and if I am accurate in guessing Robert’s thoughts, that thinking would be entirely incorrect, in fact).

Here’s the thing: a lot of really good stuff gets said in the comments boxes. Certainly I’ve been proud of some of the content I have had to come up with in various debates or discussions that have emerged in comments threads. Moreover, and more importantly, a lot of commentators at this site have had some very good things to say as well. Some of it has been nothing short of astounding, in fact. And it’s almost always been entertaining, or heartfelt, or some mixture of both.

This site doesn’t get all that much traffic in a day, and it seems such a waste — both for me and for my commentators — to be investing so much effort in composing a reply to something that someone else has written, only to post it in an article that might, over the course of the next month, garner a dozen hits (in a very good month). I’m really not trying to retreat from any discussions, even ones in which I am currently embroiled. In fact, my ultimate goal is to make such discussions even more publicized. Erf had a decent suggestion when he requested that I add a “five recent comments” plugin to the sidebar, but I’m interested in taking things a step or two further. Not only would I like to publicize some of the efforts that I put in to responding to people who comment at this site, but I would also like to showcase some of the truly bright, truly thought-provoking things that my commentators have to say.

To that end, the site contact form has had its security restrictions loosened to match those of the comments form, in that it allows for hyperlinks now. It incorporates spam protection, and URLs can be inserted. HTML can be entered as well, but it won’t be processed as HTML by the form; it will convert the text symbols to ASCII on send. What that means, though, is that I’ll get the HTML tags at my end, so when I reply to you in a new site post, it’ll be easy to preserve your intended formatting.

Anyhow, this is kind of a trial thing for me, but I hope it works for the Reader.