Simon Willison’s Weblog

Innovation chez Orchard

Dunstan Orchard’s great looking blog has had a whole bunch of upgrades, and some of them are pretty interesting. Firstly, he’s taken my blockquote citations script and modified it to handle citations that aren’t links in an intelligent way. He also now has a comment spam blacklist (I really need to work out the syndication details for that and publish some code).

His most interesting new feature is comment alerts, a system that allows people to keep track of discussions that they have participated in on his blog. Dunstan’s system allows users to “opt in” to allow future commenters to alert them if their comment is relevant to what the original user posted. It’s well worth surfing over and checking out Dunstan’s explanation of the system, which may well materialise on this site as well some time in the future. There are quite a few other neat tricks around the site, some of which are detailed in the Colophon.