We upgraded Dappered.com to the Disqus commenting system this weekend. Went fairly smoothly (there are still a few minor issues to tackle). If you’re transitioning from the WordPress default to Disqus, here are a few tips:
- Make sure to update your custom style sheet path. Our development site is password protected, and I couldn’t figure out why the production site was triggering the password validation for a while. Woops. It was the style sheet. I had fixed the styling problems the week before and forgotten about the CSS link.
- Purge your spam comments to make the import/export work. Dappered.com had 108,000 spam comments. These were seriously clogging the system. Once I removed them, loading the current comments into Disqus when very smoothly. (Note: the delete query in MySQL should look something like this: delete from wp_comments where comment_approved = ‘spam’)
- Tell your readers what you’re doing. We alerted readers on Friday that things were changing. When the change was complete, we updated the post. We’re getting good feedback. And we can address people’s questions and worries.
That’s it! Now people can use their Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo, or OpenID credentials to comment; they can subscribe to threads via email; and we get serious moderation tools like blacklisting and IP blocking. It’s going to be great.
photo credit: salimfadhley | Speakers’ Corner, London … the original commenting platform.
Google’s Not Getting Worse, Facebook Is
Google’s search results have been a hot topic lately, because many bloggers have been anecdotally seeing poorer results. Is it true? Matt Cutts, over at the Official Google Blog, says it’s not true … but they’re going to fix it:
What seems to be happening is that independent bloggers are uniting against the big content mills like Demand Media and Associated Content. Content farms rely on Google rankings for nearly all of their money. In a clever move, instead of trying to beat these big guns on the results page, they’re going after Google to change the game. I like the strategy. I’d much rather read an interesting blog post that solves my 2WIRE WEP/WPA problems than read some crap on eHow. But all this chatter is obscuring the real problem: Facebook is starting to get lame.
Facebook is just not as interesting as it once was. Previously entertaining friends have fallen off the wagon. Updates that used to ignite a lively discussion now just get a few ‘likes’ as they sink their way down the news feed. My parents have joined Facebook along with everybody else and now it’s boring.
I miss the old Facebook. And if I still operated in the old Facebook fun-iverse, I’d create a Facebook page to rally around. Instead, I’ll wait for somebody else to create it so all I need to do is ‘like’ it.