There really needs to be a better way for me to respond to peoples comments. If you've registered on this site, you can choose to be notified of replies I make... but why would you register? I certainly don't feel like creating Yet Another User Account for every site I leave a comment on..

This is somewhat amelioriated by the face that one can log in with LJ username/password, or a username/password from another site that also runs drupal; but that requires that you give me your password for that third-party site, and trust me not to do anything malicious with it. I certainly don't want to be giving out my LJ password to any sites I leave comments on...

Some sites let you leave an email address and tick a "notify me of updates" box, but I don't find this particularly satisfying - the email address is almost never verified, and when it is, it's almost as much hassle as Yet Another Account. If it's not, the site owner is leaving themselves open for problems of the mail-could-not-be-sent variety, not to mention an oblique method of spamming - respond to a comment, supply your victims email address, then respond to that comment so your victim gets an email.

openid looks like a good candidate for solving most of this problem, but not all; it addresses the yet-another-account and providing-thirdparty-passwords issues, but still doesn't provide a mechanism for notification of responses (nor should it, that's a seperate problem). At least it should provide a way to get around the neccessity to verify your email address..

As the best workaround I know of, I've added a comments feed to this site. I want one of the cool "RSS: Comments" buttons to go over on the left (underneath the "Thanks Dave" button) - but, despite having seen these things round a lot lately, I can't find one to copy now when I want one.

So for now, here's my comment feed. I don't find this a particularly satisfying solution either, as it doesn't provide any indication of which post a comment was about.. Perhaps the extensions to RSS that DW and MS (what an odd pairing that is...) are starting to talk about might help this. Maybe this is a case where we really need OPML.. not sure.

If you're on LJ, you can subscribe to zb_comments instead.

I'm about to respond to a few peoples comments, so if you've commented recently, at least click on the feed above right now to see what I said :)