I’ve been hating my blog the past couple of days because I’ve been trying to get a commenting system called Disqus, pronounced, “discuss.” I would pronounce it, “disgust” because I just couldn’t get it to display right. I poured over my code and CSS and there wasn’t anything wrong with it, aside from a small value I placed in my CSS that made all the graphics huge. A part from that, there just wasn’t anything wrong. I worked on it for hours on Saturday and it wasn’t coming together. I then put it aside and started in on it Sunday and I still wasn’t able to fix it.
All of this heartache was due to Brandon Bautista, a friend by way of Twitter (@bbautista) and Viddler (bbautista). He mentioned he wasn’t able to comment on my blog. I knew then what the following days were going to entail. I had avoided it like the plague, enabling comments.
There were a couple of reasons I chose not to enable comments. First, they’re time consuming to implement and write the CSS for; second, very few people actually comment, making all the work I put into enabling them wasted. Besides, I thought, “who is actually going to read my blog anyway?” If I’m lucky a member of my family might glance at it, get bored part way through and move on to more interesting, Disney related blogs.
Then I remember Disqus. I had used them for another blog I started last year, but abandoned and I remember it couldn’t have been easier. It was all automatic, I downloaded a plugin, activated it and everything was set up. It was awesome. Then I tried it with this blog, and as I mentioned before, a living nightmare ensued.
After spending hours trying to get it all working, I finally gave up and remember there was another comment service, Intense Debate, that did basically the same thing. I was hopeful and dreading this also wasn’t going to work. I was already signed up, so all I had to do was download and activate the plugin, register my blog, then refresh. There it was, perfectly displayed and functional ready for comments. That’s how it should be.
My tussle with my blog wasn’t over yet, there was still one more thing I wanted to do and that was add ShareThis at the bottom of every post. This heartache was due to Mario Kluser, a friend by way of NaNoWriMo, Twitter (@mariokluser) and Viddler (mariokluser). He tweeted and stumbled my iPad Thoughts post and that prompted me to make it easier for someone to do that in the future.
Oh my goodness, talking about this is almost as bad as actually doing it. To make this long and boring story longer and more boring, I’m going to go into minute detail about how, why and what I ended up having to do to get this ShareThis button to actually work. The plugin didn’t work no matter what I tried to do, and I tryed several things over the course of about an hour. The button never displayed at the bottom of my post like it was supposed to. I deactivated the plugin, pasted some script into my theme and got it to work that way.
Needless to say, I never want to create another blog. I hate everything about it from the HTML, CSS, troubleshooting, getting plugins to work, the endless hassles, and for what? So I can type out and force you to read an endlessly boring post about comments and ShareThis buttons? No thank you. The great thing about this blog, is there are very few actual graphics so if I wanted to change the colors, it would be rather easy, and now that I have comments and a ShareThis button that’s one less hassle. Yay for forethought! Groan.