Comments now disabled after two weeks

John Scalzi wrote a
long, thoughtful post about what comments do and don’t do for
a blog.

His suggestion was that for a blog like this one, where
comments do not contribute significantly to the content of the
site, it might make sense to disable commenting after a few days,
or even entirely.

The spam comment is one of the things that makes reading my
mail more of a chore and less of a pleasure. If you don’t have a publicly
accessible blog, spam comments like, “Wonderful blog, I have
bookmarked it,” seem to be something any human can
spot in a small number of seconds, but computers can’t catch at
all. So I thought about Scalzi’s remarks, and went ahead and did it.

Now, you have fourteen days to comment, and after that, comments
will be closed.

If you really have a comment that will add something, of course
you should feel free to let me know and I’ll open that post or put
your comment up myself or something.

Wonderful new python interface silently makes a decision for you

While I was testing to make sure the above was true, I found
that all the recent posts, which I have been making via my python
script, had the comments closed.

This turns out to be because a variable, whose allowable
contents aren’t documented (in the python documentation — they
probably are part of the API) defaults to ‘closed’. I made a wild
guess and set it to ‘open’ and that seems to have fixed the problem.