Whether a tree falls to the south or to the north, in the place where it falls, there will it lie

Well, I’ve been in the blog tweaking mood for a little bit and I’ve made a few mild changes here and there. One of the most recent changes is that instead of having WordPress comments hosted in my database and wordpress installation, I’ve moved them over and have them hosted and handled by disqus.com.

I love experimenting with things, so I may end up hating it and switching back or I may love it and keep it on forever, we’ll see.

The idea behind disqus(pronounced discuss) is to keep the conversation going, or as written on their site, webwide discussion.

The idea seems great. If all your comments are located in one place, then it makes it easier to keep up and track what’s going on in a site after you have left a comment. This actually happens to be one of the features I like best about blogs that are hosted on the wordpress.com. If you have a wordpress.com account, whenever you log into your account, you can click on My Comments from the dashboard and see what new comments have been posted since the last time you left yours.

The idea behind disqus to me seems to be to be able to do this with all sites across the web. It’s dirt simple to sign up/into disqus. If you’ve posted a comment before, more than likely a profile has already been created for you, all you have to do is claim it (I went ahead and imported all my previous comments into disqus btw) by clicking on your name. You can then add your website/blog if you have one (disqus works across multiple platforms such as wordpress, blogger, tumblr, MovableType and more).

According to their website, disqus will help accomplish the following:

• Provide Easy Connected Comments: Disqus is a powerful comment system that easily enhances the discussion on websites. In minutes, connect your community with those of over 25,000 other websites. Track conversations across the web, plus bridge discussions with your favorite services such as FriendFeed and Plaxo.
• Provide More Interactive Discussions: Threaded replies reveal the conversations in your comments: And now it’s easier to keep the discussion alive with email and mobile replying. Features such as ratings and video comments make comments interactive and expressive.
• Better Tools for Admins: An intuitive admin section makes it easy to moderate the discussions from one or multiple websites. Disqus is easy to customize, with widgets that lets your audience become your community. With search engine-friendlydata sync, Disqus is as safe to use as it is easy.

Also, Disqus incorporates gravatars, so if you have one, it will continue to show. In addition to that, you can leave video comments through seesmic‘s video comments (I had a plugin that allowed that previously, although nobody ever left one).

Having disqus means that a few of my plugins will no longer work. Subscribe to Comments (you won’t really need it if you do the disqus thing). Neither will UserAgent Spy, which was more for fun. This is the one that showed what browser and OS you were using when you left a comment.

So let the testing and experience begin. Check out disqus and leave a comment below telling me what you think about it.

Do you like it, hate it, don’t really care?

I’ll see how I like using it. It might stay, or it might go, but I’d love to know what you think.

disqus, blogging, commenting,