User Editable Comments
Ever submit a comment on a weblog and right after you’ve pressed “post,” realize that you made 10 spelling errors? Ever post a link in a comment, only to realize that you munged the URL? You debate whether or not you should post another comment, correcting your spelling errors, or fixing your link. Is it worse to be seen as a bad speller, or as a person who thinks what they have to say is so incredibly important that a spelling error would be an affront to God? If you spend any amount of time reading blogs and commenting on them, this may be a scenario you’re familiar with.
I decided to correct the problem, at least on my site. Now, when you leave a comment here, you will have 30 minutes in which to go back and edit it. If you look at your comment, you will see a link next to it that says “Edit This Comment” (or something like that… I haven’t settled on that). If you click that link, and enter in the email address you used to submit the comment, you will be able to edit it. Your changes are saved to the database, the entry is rebuilt (so that your changes show up immediately), and then you’re kicked back to the entry page, where you get to see your handiwork. It’s kinda slick, actually, and I’m rather proud of it. I had to write some Perl code (which I know almost nothing about), and had to write a PHP script to handle the getting and updating of the comment.
So give it a try! Leave a totally random comment on this post and then go back in and edit it all you like. Let me know how you like it and what you think could be improved. If there is enough interest, I might be convinced to release this publicly. It doesn’t require any modified MT code and works directly with the MySQL database (sorry, no other database type supported… get a real database!) Unless MT 3.0 totally changes the names of the MySQL tables, it’ll be compatible with MT 3.0 when it launches. That being said, MT 3.0 will introduce several new comment features, and one of them might be comment editing. So my hard day’s work could be for naught. Oh well, it’s cool for now. 
