I’ve been working away behind the scenes for the last few weeks on a new system for comments (hence the delay with updates on occasions) and this morning I’ve rolled out the first round of changes – threaded replies and gravatars.

First up, you can now reply directly to a comment. You can do this in two ways. Firstly you can click “reply” after the comment you wish to reply to. This automatically selects the comment you wish to reply to in the drop down menu under the main text area. You then just type your reply and click submit.

A more long-winded way to reply to a post is to select the post manually from the dropdown menu at the bottom of the comments under the text box.

Anyway, replies will thread under the relevant comments once posted. There’s a limit on the level of threading which I can tweak a little, but lets just see how we get on with that as we go.

This now means that you and I can answer queries directly rather than having to refer back to comments and use those “@” thingy’s to give reference to comments. Pretty useful I reckon.

Perhaps less useful but more exciting, I’ve introduced gravatars. These are the little pics you see next to comments in posts. These are generated from the emails you input for your comments. Every visitor who posts a comment can have their own unique gravatar next to all their comments.

These are pretty common around other blogs and most stick up a photo of themselves – although if you’re shy or Iain Dowie, feel free to post any image you feel best represents you. Bear in mind that the image you select will be posted on any other site that you post a comment on using the same email address – if that site uses gravatars. So if you choose a photo of yourself for this site, but post regularly on the “I love Graham Poll” blog, you may want to think again to save embarrassment.

To get yours just click on the default gravatar image and follow the instructions at the gravatar site. Alternatively click here to set yours up.

Gravatars refresh at this site every hour so it may take a while for your image to appear. Please ensure your image is classified as “PG” when you upload it. It goes without saying that all images should be suitable.

I’ve also added a new “Recent Comments” widget to the sidebar. I’ve got some formatting to do to this but that will take place later today I imagine.

The next phase is to introduce the ability to edit comments. I have that working on the test site and I expect to get that to you later today all being well.

Anyway, have fun with this. If it all goes “Bramblesque” then I’ll take it down and revert back to tried and tested.