I often hear from designers and client-side developers who are interested in adding more dynamic content to their sites, but have not yet learned server-side coding skills. That’s why I think that apps like Instacomment fill an important niche! With Instacomment, you put a PHP file on your site and a JavaScript snippet in your XHTML files, and it adds full commenting functionality to your site. So far, the service is free.
I decided to try it out on one of my course pages. It took about 10 seconds to setup, and seems to do what it promised quite well. You assign tags to comments (based on the ‘comment button’ they are associated with), and you can log into their web site to manage all of your different threads.
Of course, the ideal solution would be to write your own app — you have to go out of your way to customize the look of this one, and the PHP file has “//MAY NOT BE RE-DISTRIBUTED OR MODIFIED IN ANY WAY!” in the comments above deliberately obfuscated code. Was all-caps really necessary?
For a quick commenting engine that doesn’t require any server-side knowhow, Instacomment is a good option.
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