It took me about half an hour to set up and I can already see the advantages:
- Anyone can post a comment, be they on Twitter, Facebook, OpenID or Google Account (which is basically OpenID).
- When I created a profile it took my Gravatar which I created on my Wordpress account. How neat is that? It's always a bit unsettling when I comment on a site which recognises my OpenID and prematurely displays some of my profile information.
- It has loads of features, threaded conversations, responses, trackbacks. Actually that's all I can think of off the top of my head, it's more features than Blogger's default commenting system.
- Moar bonus points for when some exam board person comes and grades this blog for my AS Media qualification.
Disadvantages:
- I doubt 'adding the next new innovation in commenting on the internet' is on the OCR checklist of things that get you points.
- This kind of thing has been around for a while, it's only now that it's been brought together in one popular service that everyone will (probably) use.
- Matt Mullenweg (one of the people working on Wordpress) complained about it. He claims the comments aren't searchable by Google. There's some ambiguity over this, I personally don't mind.
Keeping all this in context there's only been 4 comments on this entire site in the whole 5 months and 38 posts since it's existence. One could argue that implementing a new commenting system and writing all about it is a futile and pointless act. I would reply that I have nothing to do on a lazy afternoon in half term and the only alternative is completing a fiendishly hard level of Serious Sam HD, which I shall do as soon as this post is finished. Right about... now.
Posts
