Grand Text Auto and the CommentPress Theme

Grand Text Auto is "a group blog about computer narrative, games, poetry, and art."  I stumbled across it in this Blog Herald article by Anne Helmond.  One of Grand Text Auto's authors, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, is using the blog as a peer review platform for his upcoming book, Expressive Processing.

Several books have been built around a blog before, of course, including our group's own Naked Conversations.  What I find interesting in the Expressive Processing project though is their use of a WordPress theme called CommentPress.  The typical blogging tool/platform was designed for much broader use than just book authoring and editing.  That's why it's so awkward at times to comment on or read comments about book content that is being written on a blog.  Questions like "what paragraph does this comment refer to?" are pretty common, particularly since all the comments appear at the end of the post with no linkage to a section in the post/chapter itself.

CommentPress does a great job addressing this issue.  Take a look at Expressive Processing and you'll see what I mean.  For example, this particular passage called "Audiences and Processes" had 5 comments when I wrote this post.  All 5 of those comments are tied to the second paragraph, hence the number 5 just below the comment bubble next to the second paragraph.  Click on that bubble to display the comments tied to that paragraph.  As you scroll down you'll notice that the comments box remains anchored on the screen so it's always right there for easy access.

If you're writing a book on a blog or know somebody who is, be sure to tell them about the CommentPress theme.

Comments

[Andrew]

Thanks for the tip. It's timely, since I will shortly launch a book blog.
Andrew