At long last (read: I finally asked Gareth how to do this) I've finally managed to sit down and write a greymatter modification that generates an external file with data about recent comments. I've currently got it set up to generate five results, but it can be customized for as many or as few comments as your little journaling heart desires.

As usual, it made perfect sense once I finally gave up and said to Gareth, "How in the world do I do this?" He gave me five lines of explanation, and that turned out to be all I needed.You can pick up a copy of the recent-comments.zip file here. It contains a code snippet to add to gm-comments.cgi, as well as directions on how to modify the final PHP output.

Now that this is done, I can finally do what I've wanted to do for ages—enable comments on all posts over on geek-chick.net. Let the madness begin.