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Housekeeping: Upgraded Commenting

disqus2[1]Site upgrades are always well intended but don’t always go as planned. About a year ago, we tried to install Disqus (one of the most popular commenting systems on the internet) and ran into all sorts of problems before reverting to our more standard commenting system. After persistent recommendations from Inside the Hall, we finally decided to make the jump.

Things seem to be working relatively smoothly at this point which means there should be plenty of new features to be tested out. The list includes:

  • Social integration: You can post comments by using your Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo, Open ID or Disqus accounts. You can also share your comment through your social networking accounts as well.
  • @ replies: Need to address someone directly? You can tag their name in your comment with an @ sign.
  • “Like” functionality: Love a comment? Hit the “Like” button
  • E-mail notifications: You can configure e-mail alerts for replies, mentions or new comments on a particular thread.
  • Unlimited Threaded Comments: Threaded comments can now expand beyond 4 or 5 replies, a limitation of the old system.
  • Attach Images: You can also attach images to your comments.

We want to encourage everyone to register a Disqus account, which can be done through the posting framework, to improve your experience. Registering will allow you to include an avatar with your comments, associate your comments with your account and enable a number of other features.

If you have any problems with the new commenting software, don’t hesitate to shoot me an e-mail.

Sidebar Tweaks

We also made some small tweaks to the tabbed area at the top of the sidebar. We shuffled the tabs around and more importantly replaced the recent comments section with a links module. Similar to the m.go.licious feature on MGoBlog this is a collection of links that are worthy of sharing. Quite a few of these may end up in links or bullets posts down the road, but this should be a nice place to browse if you need some extra reading material.

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