As you can see by looking at the left sidebar on this page, the old Recent Comments feature has been removed, and a new link for Recent Comments at the top of the page has been added.

There are three old posts (link, link and link) which detail the problems we had with our old Recent Comments feature. We think this latest fix is our best bet.

So, if you like to follow along with new comments to old posts, click the new Recent Comments link and have at them.

As with anything new, there are pros and cons. The biggest con, of course, is that the new thing is new and not the thing we are all accustomed to using. The biggest pro is that it works reliably, unlike the old one.

The other cons to the new system are that it requires you to click away from the home page to see if there are new comments to be read, rather than showing post titles on the sidebar, and it doesn’t keep track of what you’ve read.

The other pros are that when you get to the Recent Comments page it shows some of the text of the comment, which will help you recognize if you’ve read it before, and shows the entire text of short comments, so if someone writes “+1 TimK” you can get the point without even needing to go to that page. So while it costs you a click up front, it should save some wear and tear on your median nerve overall.

You might also notice that we condensed some of our links in the left sidebar, adding PDD Google+ and PDD YouTube links, and removing the link to our Duluth Guides, a feature we thought we would develop into something awesome, but instead was largely neglected and forgotten.