The Great Comment Switch: Disqus

I have been using Disqus on a number of the new blogs here at /Edgewards, so I decided that it might be time to step up to the new comment system for /Message.

Knowing that I would have to convert the Typepad templates to ‘advanced’ — which means that Typepad’s WYSIWYG system for managing the look and feel of blogs would not longer work — I put off the switch to Disqus until I had other reasons to change the templates in this radical fashion.

The first motivation to change templates arose from the limitation of Typepad’s formatting options in the WYSIWYG system. In particular, I have been adding a number of contributors to /Message and other blogs, and I wanted to be able to display the author’s name near the top of the blog post, so that readers can see who has written the post easily, without having to scroll to the bottom of the post, which was the only location offered by the preconfigured templates from Typepad.

So, I had made that change, which involved a long tiresome process involving creating several new templates and modifying many of the existing ones, and then replicating that for each of the three blogs involved. I also made a number of other stylistic changes, and tweaked existing styles a bit, like making the technorati tags and other footer information smaller fonts.

Ok, so then I turned to the Disqus comments insertion. There are directions and templates for the ‘seamless’ integration with Typepad, but they are based on the flawed assumption that the Typepad user has made no other changes to their Typepad templates. Their step-by-step process is based on simply cutting and pasting their slightly modified version of the default Typepad templates.

As a result, I had to laboriously find the various Disqus specific elements of template code (thank goodness they put in comments in the code, so they could be readily found), and insert them at the corresponding locations in my already hacked templates. And, note, that is several locations, I had hacked the same regions of the templates that Disqus had, as well. (For example, I had applied a tweak to the templates — one detailed in Typepad help pages — to omit the name of the author at the bottom of each post. Note that there was no note from Typepad describing how to put the author’s name at the top, however. And wait until I try to create a hcak to fetch a photo of the author to display at the top of the post, too.) Nevertheless, I was able — based on a considerable amount of experience with Typepad — to get the contraption up and running.

I am willing to share the templates, by the way, once I have things tied down and finalized. Maybe I can work with Typepad to figure out how to do that sensibly.

By the way, it would be really helpful if Typepad tweaked things so the templates that are made accessible by ‘converting’ to ‘advanced’ actually included comments in them, describing what the hell is going on in the gobblegook there. Not everyone wants to have to search in the Typepad help pages and forums to find out what $MTAuthorNickName is. (Note: the MT stands for Moveable Type, despite the fact that this is Typepad.)

So, I will be reporting on the changes that follow a transition to something like Disqus, or specifically the switch to Disqus. I read some posts recently intimating that Disqus will be pulling comments made out in the commentsphere (like Friendfeed, Twitter, Readburner, etc.) back into the blogs where the initial posts were made. I want that, so I decided to make the switch, despite the headaches.

On, and from now on, all posts will have Disqus integrated while older posts will still have Typepad comments.