[This post is technically obsolete and has become entirely irrelevant; it is retained solely because there is no compelling reason to delete it.]

OK, no sex in this entry, just an explanation of my ugly new comment system.

I want comments. A blog just isn’t a blog without them. But I’m using a sort of unusual setup here. My hosting arrangement doesn’t allow any sort of server side scripting, and I like it for other reasons. So I’m using a freeware client-side database-oriented blogging application called (creatively) “Blog“. It’s handy as heck, but there’s a catch.

The catch is, Blog’s provisions for a comment system are email based and not terribly sophisticated. It works like this:

You click the comment link, you send an email. Thanks!

Blog checks its email every 10 minutes. (My email provider gets unhappy with more frequent checking.)

If Blog gets an email with a proper comment header (which happens only if your email client faithfully notices and inserts the proper subject string from the mailto: URL) the email is downloaded. Then ErosBlog gets immediately republished to include your comment.

Although the comment can contain any HTML you like, the system doesn’t automatically show the email address or web page of the person emailing the comment. Please do feel free to include these in the body of your email (although they won’t be clickable unless you surround them with the appropriate href tags).

Lots of problems with this ugly system. But, in a crude primitive way, it should make it possible to comment on my blog. I’ll look for a better way, I promise! Meanwhile, thanks for reading and commenting.

2024 Update: Amazingly, the author of the Blog software referenced in this post still maintains his old pages about it. And the Internet Archive still has a working copy of his erstwhile downloads page, with working downloads links.