Jangy

Dreams Do Come True? Disqus.

To me a major part of blogging is the community and interaction with and between readers. I see a blog post not as monolog, but as a discussion.

A major frustration with blogs is that while great discussions happen, it can be really difficult to keep track of the discussions that go on on the dozens of blog that I read on a daily basis. I tend to stay on top of my feed reader, so I’m usually one of the first ones into a blog post. Often times there just isn’t a discussion going on yet.

There have been a number of solutions to try and address this. We tried it on BUMPzee where a user could install a plugin and BUMPzee will keep track of any comments on a blog post. That solution has promise, but we haven’t perfected it by any standard. Other solutions appeared about the same time, like co.comment. That was also a good idea, but if I recall, it required you to subscribe to each blog post that you want to keep tabs on. I’ll admit, it’s been a long time since I checked that out.

Recently, I came across Disqus on Costpernews and I instantly fell in love. It’s a blog platform plugin that intercepts the local comment process and replaces it with a solution hosted at Disqus.com.

They replace the standard blog comment system with what’s effectively a forum. The plugin displays the comments right in the post, so they’re still available on the blog to users and to search engines.

I’m ever-reluctant to rely on a third-party service for something so critical as my blog comment system. There’s obviously the possibility that the service could become unavailable, and disable my comment system, but let’s assume they’ve got it together operationally. My biggest concern is simply, what if I don’t want to use them any more? My comments are not getting placed into my own database. If that ever came to be, would I be able to get my comments? Would I be able to get them back into my own Wordpress database?

Despite those concerns, I was this close to installing it on my well-established jangro.com blog, but I got cold feet. So, in a way, Discus.com is the primary reason I finally got of my butt and created this second blog, so I can play with cool stuff like Disqus.

You’ll see this cool comment interface in the posts on this blog. It handles threaded discussions, user avatars, even spam. Give it a spin. Post a comment.