A little while back, I heard the news that Automattic, the folks who develop WordPress, acquired a couple of new services. One of these is called “IntenseDebate”:http://intensedebate.com, a dynamic commenting system that’s compatible with several different blogging platforms. Initially, I’d installed it on “Reclaimer”:http://reclaimercomic.com as a test drive but pretty quickly removed it again. At that point I didn’t feel it was ready, and my readers confirmed my opinion (rather vocally, I might add).
About three weeks later, IntenseDebate came back out of their invite-only mode, so it was time to give it another try – and the updates have made all the difference. I’m running IntenseDebate on four of my sites now, and I’ve watched discussion on _Reclaimer_ alone double and, in a couple of cases, triple from what it was before I had IntenseDebate installed. Granted, IntenseDebate still has periodic issues and it doesn’t have quite all the features I’d like to see, but it’s improving with each new update, and I’m confident that it will continue to improve.
One of my favorite things about IntenseDebate is the ability to award Reputation Points to quality commenters. It encourages discussion, I think, and rewards those individuals who leave good comments. I’d be curious to see the algorithm that determines the ‘leveling up’ of one’s reputation, though, since it’s easier to earn Reputation Points early on and harder later.
There’s good stuff here with IntenseDebate, and now that it’s part of Automattic, I’m confident that it will continue to grow into a quality product. I’m hoping as time goes on, more and more bloggers and websites will adopt IntenseDebate, making it a truly powerful community-building system.
Yep, we were really pretty vocal about it.
I suppose we all got used to it, though.
You know, it feels a little lonely on this blog without the hundreds of Reclaimer fans.
Hehe, I agree. This blog has never been highly trafficked.
Oh, and would you mind upping the contrast between the text and the background a bit? Sometimes it's alittle hard to read what you wrote.
I'll look into it. IDC actually determines its colors automatically. I'll have to figure out how to create a custom stylesheet for this site.
For clarity, I meant comments. Just in case you thought otherwise.
No, I know. IDC actually samples the colors from the theme and determines the colors for the comment section based on that. I just need to figure out how to change those settings to my own custom colors.
I see. It sounds complicated.
There. Fixed it. Should be a lot more legible now. :)
Much better. Thanks.
No problem. It was actually a lot easier to do than I'd expected – once I found the documentation for IDC CSS.
It's probably not, actually. I just need to get the IDC guys to tell me how to find the comments stylesheet so I know which classes need tweaking.
On another note, why call this blog Shamus Writes? I don't see any connection between your name and Shamus. Is it another web alias?
'Shamus' is Celtic for James.
I see. Well, actually I don't. But you know what I mean.
I see. Well, actually I don't. But you know what I mean.
EDIT: You probably don't. Oh well.
Jim -> James -> Shamus. I was looking for something rather unique, and writersblog.com was already taken. :)
On another note, the lag is really starting to annoy me. I sometimes type out a comment, go and fetch a cup of tea and still have time to watch it finish. The worst part is that it tends to stall Firefox while it's doing that, so I can't do anything else, either.
Yeah, sometimes I just switch over to Chrome in order to type out comments. Hopefully the lag issue will be better in the next version of Firefox (that's supposed to be lighter and faster).
TBH, they always say that. And I never notice any difference, except that one or two of my extensions stop working. But I do hope they sort it out.
TBH, they always say that. And I never notice any difference, except that one or two of my extensions stop working.
From what I understand, the next version of Firefox is supposed to use a faster and lighter code library, and all the beta testers keep coming back saying that it's pretty yummy. So, I'm optimistic.
Oh, good. At least one of us is :D
I do notice that ID is slightly faster here – it's almost real-time here, instead of about 2 characters per second on the main RC website.
Honestly, I think the more comments there are on the page, the bigger the lag. I'm not sure exactly how the ID plugin works, but I suspect there's a lot of dynamic data load going on in the background that slows Firefox way down depending on the current comment count.
That might make sense. I can definitely see it slowing down, much slower than before. In that case, wouldn't it be a bad thing for more people to be commenting?
Only from that one perspective. :)
It seems to be a very important one… for me. Maybe you could have… like, a HTML-only comments mode?