Syzygy, my custom-built weblogging software, has been updated to add new commenting functionality. The first feature, which you should’ve noticed by now, is the list of the latest comments to the posts. This list is located at the sidebar of the home page, just before the archive list.

The second feature can be found in the comment entry form itself. Now you have the option of remembering your name, e-mail, and URL so that you don’t have to keep on entering it everytime you want to comment. This uses cookies so you need to turn on cookies in your browser if you want to use this feature. This functionality is quite common in most weblogging systems (like TypePad, Movable Type, and WordPress); I just copied it here.

I should probably mention that I wasted about two hours debugging the damn cookie mechanism code, wondering why it didn’t work as expected. I ended up defecting from the Reinventing-the-Wheel camp to the camp of Reusing-the-Code—I just used Perl’s CGI::Cookie module. I was up and running within 5 minutes!