Get in on the John

You know what, I want to write something meaningful today. Something useful, for a change, not just pointless and long-winded insanity.

I want to write pointless and long-winded insanity that will change your LIFE.

The road to empowerment.

I have lost track of the number of desperate people who come up to me everyday and ask me:

"Mr. Wilkos, how can I escape the day after day, hour after hour mind melting tedium of checking blog posts I have commented on, forums I have asked a question on, checking these sites every five minutes (does this sound like you? I see you smiling in the back ma'm, you know what I'm talking about), checking every five minutes for days on end, just to see if anyone has responded to my comment or query?
Surely there is some way to avoid spending the rest of my life online reloading pages just so I can see the response to my comment."

Well folks, the day of your deliverance has come. For I have found two simple online tools that will end your commenting doldrums.

Commentful

I'll begin with the less complex of the two, Commentful.

The concept is simple. Sign up on the site with your email address and a password that will be used on your account, and you can instantly login to the site and install the Commentful firefox extension.

This extension causes a tiny bulb to show up in your firefox window. Now every time you post a comment on a blog, Digg, Flickr, Zooomr, or vBulleting forum thread, all you have to do is right click on the page and select "Add to commentful". A box will pop up where you can modify the comment URL, post title, and the amount of days you want Commentful to keep checking the post for new comments. When someone replies to your comment the extension's bulb will begin to blink, allowing you to drop whatever you're doing and hurry over to see the new development in your online life. You can also keep track of your comments using the site's Watchlist.

This seems like a very handy tool, however it isn't quite as full featured or as easy to use as the second commenting tool I will show you.

coComment

Like Commentful, coComment will take you straight to your account after you register, but this time you have a choice between installing the very easy to use firefox extension, which will automatically track your conversations without the need of popups, or, if you are unfortunate enough not to be using firefox, you can click and drag a link to your bookmarks, which you click on a comments page (before you press "submit").

The coComment extension also displays a tiny icon in firefox, and it's color will indicate to you if the page you are on contains a trackable conversation or not, and when a new reply is made an indicator will appear next to it.

The coComment system of conversation tracking has many bonuses, such as a feature that will show you the people that are commenting at the same places as you (your neighbors), the ability to show your recent comments from around the internet in the sidebar on your blog (so everyone can appreciate your brilliance), and the ability to track conversations on sites that don't even have a comment form (meta conversation).

CoComment should work fine on most blogs, as well as flickr, digg, etc... with one exception. You poor souls with a Xanga blog will unfortunately not be able to integrate coComment properly in your site, as Xanga has introduced some new security features that prevent most javascript code from running properly on their pages. I think that you will still be able to use coComment to track Xanga conversations, this just means that you wont be able to put a cool button on your comment forms that allows anyone to track the conversation, without the use of an extension or bookmarklet.

Conclusion

I signed up for both of these so that I could test them for this article, and of the two I most enjoyed coComment for ease of use, active community, and large goodie bag, however, since most of the bloggers I know are all on Xanga, and Xanga doesn't let you comment without having your own Xanga, I really don't get to make that many comments, although all the comments I did make worked like a charm.

I hope you blogophiles will enjoy using these handy tools to make your life easier, I, however, will have to use them a bit longer before I decide if I really make enough comments to merit such a convenience.

Well, off to beddy-bye for me, see ya'll tomorrow.