Commentblogger bookmarklet

The problem: You post comments to other people's blog entries, as part of ongoing conversations. But you soon forget and abandon those you've commented on, so the conversation doesn't go very far. And there was that really witty thing you wrote on someone else's blog the other day which would go well on your own site... where was it again? Oh, such tsoris!

I was intrigued by thoughts from Lisa Williams and Paulo Valdemarin about maintaining a blog of one's own comments to other blogs. The question is, how do you actually enable that? Paulo suggests some big architecture involving aggregation. I don't like that idea 'cos it sounds too complicated and requires that everyone changes everything. I'd rather do a quick hack.

Here it is: Commentblogger. It's a bookmarklet. Drag it to the links bar of your browser, then edit the URL in your bookmarks manager, replacing the YOURMTPATH string with the path to your mt.cgi. (Yes, at present, it's MovableType only, but hopefully not for long - see below)

To use it when commenting on someone else's blog entry you fill in the comment form on that entry as usual, but before you submit it, you hit the Commentblogger bookmarklet. What the bookmarklet does is call up MT's usual bookmarklet-spawned New Entry window, but prefills the entry text with the contents of the first form it finds on the page from which you spawned it.

Of course, you may want to also set up a new MT blog to store your comments in; mine's here. (Remember to set the default status to "Publish" in the Blog Config - I keep forgetting that) Alternatively, you could just use your existing blog, with perhaps a new category for remote comments. You have to select that blog to post to in the MT Entry window, plus give the entry a title that reflects the content of the comment. But that's it.

This is still the first version, and it still needs lots more work...

• It only works with MovableType so far (because that's all I have to test with), but there's no reason it can't be ported to other blogware in one way or another. (If someone could help me with Radio and Blogger in particular - I just need details of any bookmarklets those systems already have for New Entry Posting, and what variables the server-side bit wants from a form)
• If the window with the remote blog entry's comment form in it doesn't have the toolbars that make the bookmarklet accessible, you're currently a bit screwed. (But just a bit. Use a context menu to get the URL of that page and open it in a proper window.)
• Oh, and it currently assumes that the first form it finds on the page is the comment form, but that should be quite fixable (perhaps by looking for the first form with a textarea in it)

... which you're all welcome to help me with, if you find it useful!