

Ask HN: Medium.com style commenting? - porker

I really like the way Medium.com has comments attached to paragraphs. I've liked it since djangobook.com first did this in 2005-2006.<p>Is there any open source library (or even blogging platform) that supports this? Or writeups of how to make the comments 'stick', even if a new paragraph/sentence is inserted?
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saturdayplace
For a while, inspired by the Django Book, I toyed with the idea of doing
something similar for screenplays and building a community where people could
offer feedback on those or other creative writing endeavors. It ended up
looking like I'd have to implement it myself, but if you're building a web
application already then this feature alone shouldn't add _too_ much to your
dev time.

My naive plan was just to give each comment-able item (eg. a paragraph) a
specific ID, and having a many-to-one relationship with comments to
paragraphs. I never followed through, so I'm not sure what pitfalls you'd
likely encounter doing it that way.

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porker
That was very similar to my original aim too! I wanted it for feedback when
drafting blog posts, and also to let people truly engage and critique my
writing, when I'm talking about history or religion.

Your naive plan was mine too, but... then I realised that for feedback while
drafting, I'd be breaking up paragraphs (with comments on them), adding new
ones before commented paragraphs etc. So it never happened.

[http://blog.bitbucket.org/2012/10/30/building-inline-
comment...](http://blog.bitbucket.org/2012/10/30/building-inline-comments-for-
pull-requests-and-commits/) seems a far more technical (and reliable) way to
handle these situations.

