Simon Willison’s Weblog

More Vellum

21st January 2003

Vellum 1.0a4 is out, and features comment support via a new Comments plugin and an Audience generic object type that abstracts the concept of “responses to your post” and is also used for Pingback support. Different response types within the same interface is a very neat idea, as Sam Ruby has demonstrated with his integrated comments, referral tracking, Pingbacks and TrackBacks. Stuart also suggests auto-discovery of You-Know-Me information from the URL of your weblog, presumably by another link element. This is a great idea, but I have reservations about the performance trade off as unauthenticated comment systems will have to retrieve the poster’s home page in the background every time they make a post.