Comments on Comments

"You've only got so many hours in the day, and like most bloggers, I've got a full-time day job, and something had to give," says Whiskey Bar's Billmon in a Wired News story about the joys and pitfalls of interacting with the readers (It's 1995 all over again!). "In the end, monitoring comments on my blog was becoming a progressively larger part of my blogging time, and I just got to the point where I wasn't able to keep up with it."

Like all blogging news stories, this one rapidly turns into a golden shower of blogger self-celebration, but while we attempt to get our own comments situation fixed to what will undoubtedly be the satisfaction of nobody, it's an interesting read. Some of the more intriguing observations come from The (no-comments-enabling) Instapundit:

"There are times that people want me to have an opinion on stuff that I just don't have an opinion on," said Reynolds. "Because I have a lot of opinions on a lot of things, people are surprised when I don't have an opinion."

Since I've always shared Lord Melbourne's view that "I wish I could be as cocksure of anything as The Instapundit is of everything," that one took me by surprise. The other one just made me laugh:

"I know that if I go more than about five or six hours without posting, or telling people that I'm not going to be blogging for the rest of the day," said Reynolds, readers e-mail him and say, "You haven't posted anything in five or six hours. Are you OK?"

It's not often that I can make a completely unsarcastic comment, but I am being totally sincere when I say thank you, everybody, for never showing any interest in the well-being of any Reason staffer, and please, please, please keep up the indifference.

Comments

[R C Dean]

please keep up the indifference

No problem.

[I'm a Leftist!]

“[i]…please, please, please keep up the indifference.[/i]”

Yeah, okay, whatever.

[L. Simpson]

What was your name again?

[The Lonewacko Blog]

One of these days I want to be known as a “blogging gadfly,” just like Dave Winer.

Say, it looks like my suppositions from the earlier post were correct: “If you’re using MySQL for your MT database, you can run the following SQL query to “approve” all existing comments (in all weblogs):

UPDATE mt_comment SET comment_visible = 1

Of course, that’s from “TweezerMan” and I don’t know who he is anyway, but it certainly seems like it would work.

However, it presumes you’re using MySQL. For all I know, BDB might be faster, but, OTOH, MySQL is a real database, i.e., relational. It’s not Oracle, but it’s close enough.

[Douglas Fletcher]

Aw, nobody likes a sob story, anyway.

[Will]

Tim, I’ve noticed a sharp reduction in Harry Potter themed headlines… Is everything okay?

[jon]

I think someone (read: someone with more sense) pushed for a Potter moratorium after the “Nearly Headless Nick” incident.

And I sincerely hope all the Reason staffers have a tremedous weekend, get ponies on their birthdays, never get tooth decay or acne, and suffer only mild forms of humiliating sexual dysfunction.

[fishfry]

“Like all blogging news stories, this one rapidly turns into a golden shower of blogger self-celebration”

A golden shower? What’s that have to do with it?