All posts by Matthew Callan

Technical Nonsense

Commenting: Okay, For Real This Time

I know I said commenting was fixed. Apparently I lied. One of these days, I’ll catch up with me and give me a piece of my mind!

Well, it wasn’t broken per se. But I wasn’t happy with Movable Type’s commenting options/interface, or at least as I wasn’t happy with the way they were working with my site. So this time, I actually did some research before destroying the site (again) and decided to go with Disqus.

This will allow commenters to upload and display avatars. It also allows for threaded commenting, and even has RSS feeds for comments. I don’t know if anyone out there is remotely interested in RSS feeds for comments. But hey, it’s there if you’re into that sort of thing.

So now to comment, you must sign in via Disqus. You may have an account with them already, since they power commenting on a bazillion blogs already. If not, signing up and registering your account should be just as easy as it was with Movable Type–plus you’ll be able to upload an avatar that will actually display.

The bad news: you know all those awesome comments you added when I finally “fixed” commenting? They’re kinda gone. They exist somewhere in the bowels of my site; I just have to find them and reinsert them in the older posts. But other site tasks may take precedence over that. Sorry about that.

But I promise that I won’t screw around with commenting again if I can help. And by “if I can help it,” I mean, “as long as something better doesn’t come along.

Onward and upward!

Technical Nonsense

Commenting: The Final Word, Or Is It?

3 Comments

After many hours of mostly fruitless labor, here is what I have determined vis-a-vis comments for this here site.

1) All users should be able to register with Movable Type and, after confirming their email address, post comments to Scratchbomb.com. I have not yet figured out how to allow userpics, which has more to do with weird server/database/technical issues that the makers of Movable Type have yet to resolve.

2) I have had no luck trying to post comments via TypePad Connect. Which is too bad, because their commenting interface looks pretty good. However, it’s still in beta, which is techspeak for “it don’t work yet.” If TypePad Connect was a car, it’d be a sleek Maserati with three wheels and no coolant.

I’ll let alla y’all know ASAP when the userpic issue has been resolved. But for now, you should FINALLY be able to post comments. So go ahead, tell me about your awesome Facebook page or how to add inches overnight.

Technical Nonsense

Comment Away(?)

2 Comments

Looking at some of Scratchbomb’s site activity, I got the impression that some folks were trying to comment, but couldn’t. I changed some site settings, so hopefully that should be fixed. If it is, comment away. If you’re still having trouble, let me know and I’ll do what I can. Shovel more coal in the mySQL server, maybe.

Update 11:35am: Okay, I’ve tinkered some more. Commenting is now enabled via TypePad. So if you create a TypePad user account, you should now be able to comment. Why, Sean from Massapequa was able to comment on his own post!

Update 2:54pm: Okay, turns out I’m profoundly out of my league when it comes to writing code, because somehow I totally messed up my site trying to fix comments. So I had to start the site over from scratch. Hurrah! Bear with me as I rebuild this bitch from the floor up, and hopefully find some way reader types can comment easily.

Update 3:32pm: I think I’ve fixed things. The story of how I fixed them is incredibly boring; suffice to say, it was mostly my own dumbassery/ignorance that kept people from commenting. You should now be able to register and confirm your account via Movable Type; I can’t confirm the usefulness of other methods at this time, but you can feel free to check em out if you’re feeling adventurous. I will be re-spiffing up the site and returning the old posts later tonight.