I’m ready to unveil the first step in the redesign of our commenting system, and I’m sure this is going to be popular with the lizard army.

One of the coolest things about Ajax technology is that it lets you reload only information that needs to be updated. This means you don’t have to reload an entire page’s worth of data when all you want to change is one section.

It’s a classic win-win improvement, because it means less data has to be transferred over the internet—sometimes much less. So our server doesn’t work as hard, and you get the new information much faster.

I’m applying this concept to our comments now, and the new feature is a great example. Below the last comment in each thread you’ll now find an unassuming little button that says, plaintively, ‘new comments.’

If you click that button in an active thread, and there are new comments posted since the last time you loaded the page (or clicked the button), the new comments simply appear automagically at the bottom of list. No more page reloads to follow an interesting thread. Woo-hoo!

It has the potential to radically change the way blog comments work; the speed lets it feel almost like a chat system.

The best is yet to come; this version does not use Ajax for the posting of comments. That’s next on the to-do list. (It’s a bit more complex.)

But this ‘proof of concept’ version is useful enough that I wanted to turn it loose and let it roam free.