Friday 23 August 2013

New Commenting System and other Blog changes

If you kept following us here, you know that we are working on the design of our Blog.

So here is a short heads up about what's changed recently.

New commenting system

Disqus is now used for comments and replaces the default Blogger commenting system.
Here are some informations about Disqus and why I choose it:

Login for Comments
To comment, you can login via "Disqus-Account" itself, or via Twitter-, Facebook- or Google-Profile.
I think everyone of you should have at least one account on those services.
And if you don't have one (or don't want to use one to sign up for Disqus), you can still post as a guest!


Managing Comments
We will have more control over comments.
Moderation will be possible, so we can edit comments to remove links to piracy or personal information shared by users to protect their privacy ;)
I also hope that the Spam filer works better than the one provided by Blogger.

Following your Comments/Replies
With a Disqus account, you will be notified whenever you recieve a reply to your comments.
It is now even possible to follow the comments of a specific post via RSS.

Many websites use the services of Disqus.com.
With an account, you will be able to comment on many websites and keep track of your own comments, as well as the replies you receive.

New View
Implemented in Disqus is a rating system.
You can "+1" good comments and they will show up on top of the comment section. So the whole view gets a lot more dynamic.

And as mentioned before, Disqus allows you to keeps track of your comments, which I think will make communication with other users easier and provide you a more personal experience for communication.

Alternatives
I have given this desicion some though.

Of course one choice would have been to keep things as they were... staying with the default Blogger comments. But I believe the Blogger commenting system is outdated and doesn't provide a "2013 experience".

Another very comfortable solution would have been to use Google+ for comments.
Google allows the integration of Google+ into Blogger.
It would have been simple and with the connetion to a social network very interesting to see how it affects the daily page views.
But this option would require every user to login via Google+ to comment... So anyone without a Google+ account would have been locked out.

So I hope that you guys like the change and agree with me to give Disqus a chance.
If you don't agree, speak up and tell me I am wrong!

Btw. former Blogger comments will be imported into Disqus, it may take a while... according to Disqus' support page up to 24 hours.

Edit: all previous comments are fully imported now!

Webbrowser Compatibility

Depending on the browser you are using, you may thought my Blog looks like shit.
I was aware of that, but didn't figure out how to fix it so far...

While everything was fine in Firefox, my Blog always had issues with Internet Explorer and Chrome (don't know about others).

I did my best to fix those compatibility issues and it should look much better on all browsers now.

Mediafire

I promised to make my files available in Mediafire soon and I didn't forget about that.
It is almost done!

I uploaded all firmwares and tools, but I am still organising the files and looking for more interesting stuff to share.

I think we are ready to replace the uploaded.net very soon ;)

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