CommenTag | official blog

The Prototype library in its version 1.5 was quite buggy.
The problem is when you have a fancy old Wordpress plugin (like Lightbox 0.5), you might load Prototype 1.5_pre1 without notice, and it may broke other plugins (like the Commentag one).

If you are in that case, don’t panic.
Just update your Lightbox plugin to its latest version to date (0.6.3, available here)

If you are using another fancy plugin using an old version of Prototype, make sure to update it (Prototype is now at version 1.6.0.2)

Strangely enough, the Commentag plugin was not working on Nellio.com.
It produced some strange javascript outputs.

Digging into the problem showed that jQuery is not a friend of Prototype (two Javascript librairies).
So, I’m now running jQuery in noConflict() mode.

Besides, I also had to change
for (t in tags[])
to something like
for (t=0;t < tags.length;t++)

Because it looks like Prototype is adding some helpers to manipulate arrays which causes a for each loop to actually call these helpers. Which is really bad.

So now, it is all fixed.
Oh, btw, no one has got to update their commentag plugin
If you had the problem and turned off the commentag plugin, just re active it and it will work like a charm.

Don't forget to give us your feedback

Commentag.com - sorted thinking (teaser)Vidéo envoyée par xdammanNobody reads comments? That may change!Commentag is mixing Web semantic and UGT (User Generated Tags) to cope with information overload.Give it a try on commentag.com.

It took a bunch of hours but now it is done.
How come can  people still use IE? It is pure rubbish and a real nightmarre for web developpers.

Anyway. I’ve borrowed an old and noisy Dell Inspiron 5100  which runs IE6 and I spent my last evening focusing on making IE6 understands standards.

The most annoying thing is its lack of support of transparent PNG files. I’ve used the excellent script of 24ways which takes advantage of the IE-only functionality of post processing a page using an AlphaFilter.
More info here.

Amongst other  hacks I had to go through, there is to mention that there is a way to specifiy CSS properties which will be only interpreted by IE6.

For example, if you start your CSS property with an underscore (eg. _background: …) then only IE6 will interpret it.

In the same way, if you start with a double slash (eg. // background: …) then all browsers but IEx will interpret it (note: the standard way to put comments in a CSS file is only to use the delimiters /*  …   */ ).

Last but not least, Firefox and Safari both consider a defaut left margin of 0px for <ul> while IE6 does not.
So don’t forget to state
ul {
margin-left:0;
}

It also looks like floating elements do not always have a good presentation under IE6. Sometimes it’s better to put your object with a _position:absolute; (what I did for the commentag logo to make it overlap the main part of the site).

Other useful links to deal with compatibility issues between IEx, Firefox and Safari:

• CSS Contents and compatibility
• [ws] The Underscore Hack | Podtržítkový hack 

I noticed something strange on my parent’s Senseo. First, it seems to take longer to boot up than mine. I should investigate this and do some benchmarks. And second, the “auto shut-off” function doesn’t work. The Senseos have differents versions but mine is older. I really don’t have a good explication; I can only suppose that my parents’ machine is more used. I will keep you updated on this.

Besides this, I have been looking at Amazon’s S3 and EC2. While I think EC2 is more adapted for computing than for web services, it can help to manage the scalability.

EC2 is a service to run virtual machines (”instances”). Sure, you can build an (almost) complete virtual web infrastructure if you want. But if you want reverse proxy and load balancing, it’s up to you. You have to configure everything yourself. While this is interesting (and fun) to do, it will take a lot of time to build and maintain. Or you can use solutions like scalr or weoceo. The first is free and open source but very young and the second costs and is not so fine-tunable. Those solutions integrate load-balancing and managing tools.

S3 is the storage solution. It stores juste simple files (”buckets”) and the virtual machine images. The most important is that EC2/S3 lacks database support. Sure you can use S3 to backup the database but that’s just a hack and I wouldn’t recommend it for production use.

I think of EC2/S3 is not going to replace a real server for a web service but I still think about it for the scalability. Or to answer traffic spikes, like what Judd Vinet did (see http://hostingfu.com/article/setting-up-part-time-web-cluster-with-amazons-ec2).

I will continue to investigate Amazon’s services’ use for commentag. Stay tuned.

Good NLP is very difficult, because of real-world ambiguity inherent to nearly every real-world situation. By its nature, it truly is a NP-complete problem. Trying to solve it brute force is pointless.

“He knew what he had to do. It was, of course, an impossible task. But he was used to them. Dragging a rat all the way from the wood to the hole had been an impossible task. But it wasn’t impossible to drag it a little way, so you did that, and then you had a rest, and then you dragged it a little way again… The way to deal with an impossible task was to chop it down into a number of merely very difficult tasks, and break each one of them into a group of horribly hard tasks, and each one of them into tricky jobs, and each one of them…” — quoting Hamish Cunningham’s quote from Terry Pratchett, Truckers, p. 119.

Here comes the strategy of Commentag. True NLP is impossible. Right. So what ? No big deal ! Let’s just move on and make at least a few things work. And then some better POS-tagging. And then some more powerful semantem extraction. Until we finally obtain as good results as our big brothers.

So we are on a concrete detection of local and specific information extraction, such as dealing with nicknames, recognizing several specific subjects, defining a minimistic set of microgeneric sems or taxems, etc.

Let’s travel a bit lighter this week. Do you feel that fresh air ?

Here we are!

CommenTag is now open!
You can register your blog and download the Wordpress plugin for free!

Do not hesitate to give it a try because the coolest thing with this plugin is that it does not mess up your database and it doesn’t steal your comments!
You can activate/desactivate the plugin without loosing any single comment.

Once the plugin is activated, your blog will have these very nice new features:

• Visitors can tag their comments to enhance their visibility;
• A tagcloud with tagged comments shows up above all your discussions;
• Visitors can filter comments by selecting a mix of tags using the tagcloud.

We are looking forward to hear from you!
So please leave us your feedback!

Article released by the Bizz Magazine.
A Belgian magazine talking about business.

Translation:
Born last month at the initiative of three friends civil engineer, Xavier Damman (24 years old), Arnaud Coomans (25 years old), Olaf Witkowski (24 years old), Commentag.com proposes a plugin for blogs which allow anyone posting a comment to tag it.
A way to progressively filter comments. “The idea came to my mind with a blog I created about 4×4″, says Xavier Damman, who works by the way in London at the moment.
“It fostered many comments and a journalist who wanted to know the most common arguments (either for or against SUV). Unable to provide a quick answer, we imagined a system which could deal with that particular issue.
Addressed to information websites (magazines, newspapers, etc.), Commentag is looking for bloggers in order to test their system.

Original article written by Guy Van den Noortgate

On Tuesday, I’ve been in a meeting with Scott Rafer (MyBlogLog) and Reshma Sohoni (SeedCamp).
If there is one thing very special to remember is when Scott told me that “my problem, as many French people, is that you wait way too much to make things looking great before releasing anything.
While American people would release crap, but release something and grab the market out there.”

We are not French people though!
But we do speak French so somehow we have been influenced (I admit).
So let’s stop that influence and let’s start releasing more often less polished, but fully functional, plugins.

So, by the end of this weekend, we gonna release the first open alpha of CommenTag plugin for Wordpress.
Tell your friends, the nightmare of any of us who ever tried to catch up a conversation on a blog will soon be forgotten!*

PS: I will publish soon the minutes of this meeting, there is of course much more to say about it! Already many thanks to you guys for your great advises!

* Mmmm, at least on the blogs which will use our plugin

This is unexpected! Microsoft just contacted us today. They said they are impressed by commentag and would like to discuss about a buyout. They see great opportunities in our technology. Future projects concern integrating the technology in the MSN portal to tag content and comments, and eventually integrate also hotmail. We expect Microsoft to rebrand commentag as “Hottag” but nothing as been confirmed yet.

Meanwhile, we have also been contacted by Google. It seems that they fear microsoft to integrate commentag in their product, because it would give Redmond’s software make a significant advantage over google.

We’ll keep you updated about the Microsoft-Google story… stay tuned!