Over the weekend I did some housekeeping here, including a long-overdue upgrade to the underlying software that runs this site. The upgrade to WordPress 2.2 went smoothly. If you notice any problems, leave a comment or drop me an e-mail (ed-blog AT edbott DOT com).
Also, I’ve closed comments on every post before May 1 of this year, and my new comment policy will be to close comments within 30-60 days unless there’s a compelling reason to keep them open. Spam isn’t a problem anymore, thanks to some very good plug-ins for WordPress, but the work of maintaining old comment threads is nontrivial. I get good questions and feedback from the comments, but most of that comes when a post is fresh. After a month or two the noise ratio gets fairly high.
I realize from looking around this site that my e-mail address isn’t easy to find. I’m working on finding a way to encourage direct feedback without opening the floodgates for random comments.
Ed Bott (@ wordpress.com) 
I can think of one really clever way to do it, but I don’t know if it’s feasible.
Each article has a GUID of some kind. When you want to submit feedback to the author about that article, you click on an email link, the address of which contains the GUID. If the GUID for this article was “XKCD” (I’m keeping it short; a real GUID would be huge), the address might be something like edbott+XKCD@edbott.com. When the article is closed to feedback, that email address no longer works. This could be done through a form submitter as well, to keep the GUID private until you actually got into a conversation with the other person. I remember someone using a variant of this technique but I honestly do not remember how or in what context.