Following up on the last post regarding better conversational experiences on blogs, I thought why not improve the experience on the blog, as long as it has to be there. So I’ve put in a mix of conversation-specific plugins and hacks for ease of commenting on this blog -

• Wordpress 2.1, for some evil reason, eats up all the line breaks one puts in the comment, and replaces it by the standard <p></p> combination. So as a stop-gap solution to having all the paragraphs in a comment mashed up together, I’ve increased the margin in their CSS for a feeling of visual separation.
• You can now subscribe to the future comments on a post that you comment on. All that you need to do, is to click the checkbox in the commenting form that says “Notify me of followup comments via e-mail”.
• Gravatars!
• If you’d like to quote someone’s comment, there’s a ‘Quote’ link in each comment’s header, that you can click to auto-fill that comment’s content as a quote within your comment. Or, if you’d like to quote some text from the post or from within a long comment, select the text, go to the comment field and click the link that says “quote selected text”. You can DOO it! (Yes, Rob Schneider is my favorite actor.)
• You’d notice, while commenting, that there’s a live preview just above the form that starts filling in as you type, providing a quick way to know what your comment would look like. This isn’t perfect yet- it recognizes line breaks and doesn’t render quotes as it should - but I’m working on it, and it’s good enough to give you a reasonable idea as to what your comment might look like.

 Have an idea as to how commenting can be made more intuitive? Comment on..