Being a backend web developer really I never got around to fiddling about with all that Web 2.0 stuff much. I mean I've thrown a few pieces of code here and there but I was always more preoccupied with generating search results rather than displaying them. On the other hand I've been generating them search results for way too long and developing LotroLife.com gives me a great opportunity to explore some of the things I've never really bothered with. Lo and behold the comment system. When I first thought about it I was like - 3 hours of coding - no biggie - add a toggle visibility javascript and you're done. Then I thought that the number of comments might get big and the site loading speed would be hampered by data that would be hidden to start with. Enter AJAX. Playing around with Ajax.Updater and poking an effect here and there I think we got a pretty sexy looking system in place. Oh I know - it's probably full of bugs - probably it doesn't work and even if it does it is probably slow as a hobbit figuring out whether to cross the river on a boat or go around 500 miles over a bridge - but hey at least I've tried :). Anyways - the comments are at your disposal. Make sure to let us know if something doesn't work as expected and me - I'm finally off to turn in some quests or maybe grow and smoke some pipe weed even.
