Chronicle, since version 2.0, supports the submission of comments
 upon published posts.  This document describes how you would go
 about enabling this support.



Introduction
------------

  The basic use of chronicle is to convert a collection of text files
 into a HTML & RSS blog.

  There are two ways this software is typically used:

   Single Machine
     The blog input is stored upon your webserver and you generate
    the output directly to a web-accessible location upon that
    machine.

   Multiple Machines
     The blog input lives upon a machine, and once you've generated
    the output you copy it over to a remote webserver where it may
    be viewed.

  Depending upon which of these ways you use the software the 
 comment support will need to be handled differently.



Common Setup
------------

  Install the included file cgi-bin/comments.cgi upon the webserver
 which hosts the blog, and adjust the settings at the start of that
 file to specify:

   1.  The location to save the comments to.

   2.  The source and destination email addresses to use for notication
      purposes.



Single Machine
--------------

   If you have only a single machine then you may configure the
  comments.cgi script to save the comments in text files directly
  within your blog tree.

   Assuming you have something like this:

    comments/
      A directory to contain the comments.
    data/
      The directory where your blog posts are loaded from.


   You may then regenerate your blog via:

     chronicle --input=./date/  --comments=./comments/ --output=/var/www/blog/

   This will ensure that the comments saved by your webserver into the
  comments directory are included in the (re)generated blog.

    


Multiple Machines
-----------------

  If you have the blog input files upon machine "local" and the
 hosted blog upon the machine "remote" then you will run into
 problems:

   1.  The comments are saved by your webserver to a local directory
      upon the machine "remote".

   2.  To rebuild the blog upon your local machine, "local", you must
      have those files.

  The solution is to generate your blog in a three-step process:

   1.  Copy the comment files, if any from "remote" to "local".

   2.  Rebuild the blog.

   3.  Upload the built blog.

  With the "pre-build" and "post-build" arguments to chronicle
 you can automate this:

 chronicle
   --pre-build="rsync varz user@remote:/path/to/comments comments/" \
   --comments=./comments
   --output=./output
   --post-build="rsync vazr ./output user@remote:/path/to/location"

   
Steve
--