Time to start the beta phase for all of the add-ons for my blog. I guess it's about time I stop being so snarky about all the add ons and finally cave into the blog world circa 2003. :: First off, we have Comments Blogger FINALLY adopted comments into their blog tool, a good 2 year after everybody on planet Earth asked for it. It's OK, but it's not quite the robust I was hoping it'd be. A year ago, and everybody would be happy. Today, I think we can all do better. Haloscan seems to have come out of nowhere and become the favorite tool of choice. The fact that they support Trackback is a pretty cool thing too. And you can permalink to the comment page as well. Simple, clean, elegant. I like it. BackBlog would be the hands down winner, for a variety of reasons ... only it's not *sigh*. The great things about this tool are many. The pop-up window is customizable, with plenty of templates to choose from. The comment tag itself incorporates the name of the person who last commented. The supported tags are many. Simple, clean, no resizing necessary. (No permalinks tho) However, most of the great stuff, such as more then 5 posts, and (most importantly) email notification have been stripped from the free version. You have to pay to get these basic features found in the other two comment tools. I'm all about not paying (hence the blogger/blogspot blog, when MT seems to be perfect for what I want). I can't tell you the number of times I've missed people's comments because I didn't read my own blog. And this frustration is what fueled my current hunt. So expect to see all three here for a month or so while I evaluate. Your Comments welcome, as always. :: On a quick sidenote. Looks like I'm going to succumb to the Blogroll. The only problem I have with Blogroll is that it appears that Blogroll links are not counted either in Technorati's pagerank, nor in Google. I have several blogs Blogroll linked to me, but they don't show up in Google's Linked by pages, or in technorati's rankings. :: New Beta marked graphics coming tomorrow.