Fight Aging!

There is no doubt a special circle of hell reserved for an individual who allows twelve years or more to lapse before adding a comments feed to his or her blog. I imagine that Dante would find a lot to say about the sins of our modern technological society, were he alive to be given the chance, but I've never claimed that things move rapidly around here. It took me five years of talking about it to get to the one and only redesign in the history of this site, for example.

This update is fairly simple and prosaic. Individual comments now have anchors within a page, and are directly linked in the feed. Many of you have by now worked out that comments allow a little HTML for formatting, such as italics and bold elements, and automatically convert pasted URLs into links. That HTML will transfer through into the feed. You'll find the new comments feed at the following URL:

https://www.fightaging.org/comments.xml

The new feed is also mentioned in the help page for Fight Aging! feeds. I should say that this feed is really just a stopgap for now to make life easier for people who like to keep up with conversations here. I know you that all have far better things to spend your time on than speculatively reloading posts here to see if anything new has arrived, but that was pretty much the only option. You do still have to set up a feed monitor or reader to keep tabs on the situation if you are participating: it does require a little work on your part to keep up, but this is still an improvement over the recent past.

In the future I am planning to move Fight Aging! from its present aging and unsupported platform to a standalone WordPress deployment, but the timing of this depends upon my finding the necessary free time to devote to the project. A start has been made, a lot of the fiddly setup and deployment issues completed. Given the more than ten years of increasingly baroque additions and customization to the present Fight Aging! platform, I have to say that it isn't a straightforward migration at the application level, however. It will be worth it once done. When set up in WordPress I will have a lot more latitude to add all sorts of useful features, such as subscription to comment threads, better presentation of recent comments on the site, and other items that would be quite painful to attempt today.

It looks increasingly likely that the WordPress migration will not happen prior to this year's Fight Aging! fundraiser for SENS research programs, given that the first phase of the fundraiser will be underway in a matter of a few weeks from now. While the fundraiser is going on I will have higher priority items to tackle than the migration; while a comment feed is a poor substitute to be going on with for the moment, it is considerably better than the nothing that was in place prior to today.