Hot off the presses today, in part as announced by Mashable, is a new tool courtesy of Cubanlinks.org’s Carter Rabasa designed to sync your in-blog Disqus comments with input you’ve received via FriendFeed. In a description of version 0.1, Rabasa writes,
I’ve completed an alpha version of my Friendfeed-to-Disqus Comment Sync. It is a 100% Javascript client app, but you must download it to your computer in order to run (cross-domain scripting issues prevent hosting). The app consists of an html file and a javascript library.
Today, Rabasa has launched v.0.2 of the service, a hosted version located at https://ff2disqus.appspot.com that automatically syncs your comments every hour.
Needless to say, this plugin is causing a bit of confusion as until recently nobody’s known exactly what’s been causing Disqus comments to reemerge within FriendFeed.
So what?
This is a big deal as it provides bloggers with one new reason to adopt the Disqus commenting system. Unfortunately, though, adoption of Disqus means one of two things: movement away from preexisting comment frameworks (e.g., WordPress’ solid commenting system), or movement away from alternative comment kits such as IntenseDebate. For bloggers such as myself that prefer to protect comments within my own walls, so to speak, this increases the restlessness I feel when considering my alternatives1. There are definite drawbacks to using solutions like Disqus, and it’s getting to the point where there’s no proper solution.
As I mentioned in my predictions for 2009, I hope this commenting mess gets sorted out soon– I want comprehensive and reliable comment support within my native blogging client.
- I’ve both permanently lost comments and had them duplicated as a direct result of switching between comment systems. [↩]
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2 Comments
I noticed your footnote, stating, “I’ve both permanently lost comments and had them duplicated as a direct result of switching between comment systems.” I was wondering if you ever attempted to manually import the lost data from your old SQL tables to the new ones (I assume there was some sort of conversion script/step that wasn’t coded properly by the comment system developers)?
I don’t really see a reason why comment data would be permanently lost.
Disqus doesn’t appear to have the critical mass necessary to make it the de facto comment standard, so I wouldn’t worry just yet.
Good question– it’s likely those comments are still in the database somewhere, but I don’t have the SQL know-how to pull them out. Fortunately, it was only one or two during the transition process. Much more troublesome is the duplication– there are probably about 20 posts here with double comments with different timestamps. I went through once and deleted the extras and they came back. I give up!
Meanwhile, on my personal blog, I have been caught in the “importing comments” phase of IntenseDebate for three days. It’s a mess!
Thanks for the reassurance and thoughts!