Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Questions? Comments? Criticisms? Rude Remarks?

(Just kidding about that last one, not that you all are the rude remark sort anyhow. The post title was a catchphrase in the youth Bible study we facilitated.)

The conversation when a family gets together around the table is as important to me as the meal. In my Italian family of origin, everyone tends to talk at once and it can be a free-for-all at times, but that's part of the fun.

That sort of interaction has been limited on the blog so far due to Blogger's comment capabilities. I've also heard from a few of you that you were frustrated trying to leave a comment in the first place.

Effective immediately, the comment interface here at crumbs is now managed by Disqus. That will be familiar territory for some of you, and you can ignore the rest of this post. For the rest, here are a few pointers to ease the transition:

  • Commenters can still open the interface through the "x comments" link in the grey-shaded box at the end of each post. The comments link appears between "Posted by tinuviel at..." and "Labels."
  • Comments can be entered in the new box that pops up. At this writing, commenters can log in with their Google, Yahoo, OpenID, or of course Disqus accounts. Once I've enabled additional spam filtration, I may open comments to anyone to make things even easier on y'all.
  • The previous "subscribe to comments by e-mail" and "subscribe to comments by RSS" buttons are still available, and RSS comment subscription still aggregates comments as it did before.
  • Previous comments are being imported as I type, so no history (theoretically) should be lost.
  • Lurking works exactly the same in the new system as it did before. [Smile.]
  • Replies to one's comments come directly to one's e-mail inbox, and one can reply to replies via e-mail as well, with replies posting to the blog directly.
  • Replying to someone's comment creates a nested conversation thread in the new system, so Crumbles can interact more easily with each other and not just with me.
Those last two points are really the goal of the transition. I'm not a fan of change, but encouraging table talk here is important to me, and as I've visited other blog friends this comment system seems to facilitate that best. If (key word: "if") we ever were to have a book club, day of prayer, or Bible study together here, a means of threaded comment conversation would be essential. I'm not saying we will do something like that, but now at least it's a possibility.

If you have other questions about the new format, please post them in a comment or contact me by e-mail and I will try to resolve the issue by e-mail or in a follow-up post. If you are an e-mail or RSS subscriber and wonder what in the world I'm talking about, you are always, always welcome to visit the crumbs from His table blog and join the conversation.

Thanks for your patience with any glitches we need to work out.

Grace and peace to you in Christ,
christina

9 comments:

  1. Welcome to Disqus. I have a love/hate relationship with it, myself...

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  2. I've been wanting a more interactive comment format on my blog as well, but I was hoping some of the new updates to Blogger would just incorporate threaded comments so I wouldn't have to do anything! I'll be interested to see how Disqus works on your blog and how you like it. Kudos for braving change in the interest of better conversations.

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  3. The conversation aspect of blogging is a challenge with the way comments work. Excited to see how this works! I need to give it a try:)

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  4. I kept hoping that, too, but this system was a surprisingly smooth transition. We'll see how the community likes and uses it. Maybe you will be spared the trouble of conversion... :)

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  5. The dark side of Disqus will appear in time, I've no doubt. So far the biggest challenge has been getting an avatar photo saved. :)

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  6. Maybe you can try vicariously through me and test if you like it from an end-user perspective. The setup was surprisingly smooth. Brandee says it's not all lollipops and roses, so we'll see how bad the thorns are. :)

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  7. I changed over to Disqus myself a few months ago, and overall I am pleased with it. A couple of things that I don't like are, if someone doesn't have a Disqus account when they comment, it does not give me a link back to their blog, so I will often reply to and ask them to come back and link up their URL so that I can return the visit, but I don't think the replies automatically go to their inbox {if they don't have a Disqus account} OR else they just are not coming back over...{sad}.

    However...I wouldn't go back...happy with this for now...until I learn of something better! Hope you enjoy it too!

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  8. That's good to know. Thanks for your visit and for taking time to share what you've learned. Grace and peace to you in Christ!

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  9. I have since learned {in the past 2 hours} that when you reply to your commenters here, they DO, in fact, receive it directly in their inbox. Sorry for my wrong info earlier!

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Thank you for sharing your day with me! Your presence here is a gift. *You* are a gift. Right now I am unable to reply to every comment, but please know I read and pray for each and every commenter. Grace and peace to you in Christ.