Checksum Arcanius

It seems strange to me that people who read my Blog will talk to me in person, or on AIM, and comment on something that I wrote in my Blog. You see, there is a mechanism built into WordPress (the Blogging software I use) to add comments. Using this mechanism, your comment becomes part of the fabric of the website, and ultimately, makes the site better, in my opinion; this I like. Occasionally, I have added somebody’s online comment to the Blog myself. Commenting lets others see different points of view, additional thoughts, and so on. All of this is good.

So why don’t more people leave comments? Spending just a short time thinking about it, I came up with two ideas:

1. WordPress offers no mechanism for editing comments. If you mess up, you think you’re stuck with what you accidentally said. Or you could submit another comment, correcting the previous one, but then you just feel kinda dumb and you never comment again. Well, have no fear – Ryan is here. If you mess up on your comment, you can contact me, or submit another comment. I will usually fix up the comment for you, and delete the extraneous one. WordPress keeps no history, so no one will ever know you messed up, and I will quickly forget too.
2. Writing comments can be a scary experience. Once its in writing in the public view, it becomes much more real than a simple AIM message to me, or an in-person comment in passing. Unfortunately, this is a false sense of security. I use Trillian, and I have it set up to log all of my IM conversations. Nothing you say to me goes unlogged. Sure, its not neccesarily online, but there’s only previous bad experiences stopping me from changing that. Also, I remember everything anyone says to me, so telling me in person isn’t neccesarily safe either ;-)

If that wasn’t enough to scare you off, its time to post a comment. It is your destiny.

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