Welcome to Project Little Island The Universal Commenting System

Project Little Island is an open source, browser-based tool that allows users to engage in threaded discussion at the sites of web content even where no commenting system has been provided by the hosts.

Screen Shot of Little Island Greasemonkey Client running on the Google.ie home page

Screen shot of the Little Island Client user script
running in Firefox on the Google.ie home page.

Access to, and use of the software and service is completely free.

At present this project is in the alpha stage so there are expected to be many changes to the system (and a few disasters, no doubt). But don't let that put you off, we need willing testers using and abusing this experimental system to provide us with raw data and feedback. The current implementation of the Little Island Client is in the form of a Greasemonkey user script so you will need to use the latest version of Firefox with the Greasemonkey add-on to join in.

What you will need:

  1. Firefox browser
  2. Greasemonkey
    This is a handy Firefox add-on that allows users to create and share 'user scripts' that make on-the-fly changes to web pages as they browse. This is how the development version of the current Little Island Client is being deployed.
  3. Little Island Client
    With Greasemonkey installed this link will prompt you with a user script install option. Once installed reload the page then press Alt+L to open the comment panel. The current version is 0.09.06.13.
  4. Little Island Account
    You will need an account if you wish to add your own comments to discussions. The Little Island Client will work in read-only mode if you want to try it first. You will need to provide a valid email address for activation, but the server will only store a message digest of the address for verification of account changes.

Visit the Little Island Client Manual for instruction on how to get started.

Even though this system is still under development, you don't need to be a programmer to use it or help improve it. We need real users to tell us when things are broken, when features are not working they way they should, and when they think a feature is missing.

If you are interested in contributing to the project then please visit the developer pages for information on how the system works. You can also download the source code for both the client and server to work with. It should be noted, however, that the server scripts will require some knowledge of CGI and MySQL to set up as they are not self-installing.