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This blog now uses Disqus comments

May 13, 2008 • comments, disqus, django, site-news • 235 words • about a 1 minute read

I’ve decided to replace my implementation of Django Free Comments and Askismet in favor of a 3rd party product called Disqus. For those unfamiliar with Disqus, here are some reasons why I’ve chosen this over my own implementation:

  1. Disqus allows you login via OpenID and you can obtain a feed of your comments, Internet-wide as RSS, by API. Because of this, you can plug a feed of your comments on any blog, anywhere, like on FriendFeed.
  2. Using Disqus allows individuals to include web links and profile photos, whereas Django’s Free Comments do not support this.
  3. Finally, I get centralized Spam filtering and advanced features like comment ratings, threaded comments, and different ways to sort comments (as opposed by simply chronological order).

I’ve applied them to the site as follows:

  • Any new post will get the Disqus comment form
  • Any old post with no old comments gets the Disqus comment form
  • Any old post with existing comments will retain the old commenting system.

Now for the downside, as far as I can see, since the comments get dynamically inserted into the DOM, they probably won’t get indexed by Google. There exists the possibility that I could pull in a feed of the comments for each post and put the content into the replaced div element (for Google/SEO purposes).

Check out the new comments and let me know what you think!