I’m going to try using Pibb for comments for a while. It’s a live web-chat which uses OpenID for authentication, which most people will have already, after all, you can use your AIM account, Wordpress.com account, LiveJournal … Or you could use your Yahoo! login via idProxy or your Jabber (or Google) account via XMPP South Africa or sign up for a free OpenID from http://myopenid.com/ or https://pip.verisignlabs.com/ or http://ClaimID.com … I could go on, but this is really just a test post to see if Pibb commenting is working.

Edit I took the Pibb comments off for now.

The fact is that it’s just not up to snuff right now. The wordpress plugin itself required quite a bit of wrangling (read “rewriting”) to get it to work at all, and then once I got it working, it was rather disappointing. I had to manually rewrite the “comments” portion of my template to use Pibb instead of my current system, and when I did I still wasn’t satisfied.

1. It loads purely via Javascript, which means the comment form shows up late.
2. If you’re not logged into Pibb, you can’t see any existing comments.
3. You must have an OpenID to even see the existing comments.
4. Pibb gets extra information about my readers and me.

So instead, I’m just using OpenID for the regular comments. I think I may choose to have comments without an OpenID emailed to me instead of being displayed, but for now I’ll wait and see.