Giving Up On Disqus Comments

I keep expecting that Tumblr will announce their own take on comments (ministreams? A better version of Notes?) but they haven’t as of yet.

But the Disqus comment system just doesn’t gibe well with Tumblr, or my increasingly Twitter-oriented world. And the Disqus ‘Reactions’ — an implementation of BackType’s Twitter monitoring technology — seemed to stop working this week. So I have modified this template to drop the Disqus comments, and I have included a Tweetmeme button on each post, instead.

Here you see two posts, one with no Tweets referring to it, and the other with one. In either case, clicking on ‘tweet’ will allow you to create a tweet with a URL pointing to the post.

In the case of posts with existing tweets pointing at them, clicking on the number — ‘12 tweets’ — will open a Tweetmeme window displaying those tweets.

So, I am adopting this mechanism in lieu of external comments. At least the Twitter stream is a living breathing place, while the comment threads on blogs feel like an old cobwebby library.

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Update: Saturday 11 September 2010

I was tweeted by @golda from BackType who suggested that a BackType button might be simpler that the sort of noisy and ad-busy Tweetmeme result.

Another reason to switch to Backtype from Tweetmeme is that BackType will show results going back as far as the post was original created. Although there seems to be an issue in my case, perhaps due to the domain name change I went through at the start of the summer. So I will try this for a while and see.