In recent days and weeks I've noticed a new trend of having people visiting your site make comments - the holy grail of any White Hat website publisher is unique content.  What could be better than having visitors create (or at least help to create) that content!

Seems fairly logical to me; most blogs allow comments (assuming the blogger has not turned them off for whatever reason) - so why should "normal" sites (ie, not blogs) not also enjoy the possibilities & advantages that commenting brings.

I found a couple of scripts which do the job, one called "The Commentator" ($67) which is brought out by Big Mike and his Product Creation Class.  I have not purchased this so I cannot comment on it, other than what I know of it from it's WSO (Warrior Special Offer) and it's Sales Page.

Another is "Instant Site Comments" ($47) which is no doubt inspired by The Commentator - this one is brought out by Robert Blackstone.  Again, I have not purchased this so cannot say too much about it in terms of whether it works or not…

OK, so what's the point of this post?  Well, both of these products are not the easiest to handle - both need a MySQL database which immediately tells me that the scripts are for intermediate users at least.  This is not worrisome, as I have no doubt that installation services can be bought for a fee.

I thought I could do something a little different, and maintain the KISS principle…

So I did!

I spent a ocuple of hours creating my own "Comment" system; it does not use MySQL and so it should be easier to manage for the non-technical person.  At this moment I have it live on one site, which will be a test-bed site.

When I have some data, I'll see if I can release the Code Base…the Code Base is about 40 lines of PHP (split over a couple of files), and the whole process should be robust enough to handle being added to any Site.

Obviously as I am not using MySQL I had to make the whole application less advanced  than the two commercial products (well probably less advanced, can't say for sure as I have not seen the internal workings of the two) listed above.

But KISS is a good principle in general, and I think that my solution can be of benefit to someone! You are probably wondering why did I not just pay $47 or $67 for one of the above scripts?  Well, there's three reasons;

1. I thought I could do a different job, and maintain KISS
2. I did not want to buy a product to be accused of "copy cat" (should I decide to release my Code Base)
3. I thought I could code something up in less than $50 worth of "my time"