As you might have noticed the headspace is a huge mess right now. That's what comes of hacking projects together and then trying to unhack them later.

The big change is that I've started fixing the comments. This comes by way of a few new hacks that I hope I will be able to to eliminate in the near future. The first hack is a check that notices if the comments are in the old format and parses and converts them. The new format is a serialized perl hash. The second hack is a set of temporary stylesheet changes to make the new comments nominally readable until I can fix them.

At this point all of the old comments have been converted. If the parse failed (and I'm dignifying the process by calling it parsing) portions of comments may have been mangled permanently. Hopefully this is not the case but you might let me know if you see any butchery.

One really nasty aspect of all of this is that new comments are still added the old way and converted when the page is rebuilt. Yuck. Fixing that is the next step.

At this moment I only have access to a recent build of mozilla under linux. If you are using something else and can't read any of this, I apologize. As soon as I clean up the code I will begin testing for browser compatibility.

I have to confess some amazement that this produces readable results right now. I didn't, for instance, expect the comment fields to come out in a consistent order (perl hashes are not, precisely, ordered data structures).