donnacha's Comments

IntenseDebate Blog : Introducing WordPress.com User Accounts & Auto-Login to IntenseDebate

Thu, 4 Mar 2010 20:08:25 +0000

Wonderful news, been waiting for this, congratulations. I notice, though, that I now see to have two profiles: http://intensedebate.com/PROFILES/donnacha http://intensedebate.com/PEOPLE/donnacha The PROFILES one is associated with my WordPress account but contains none of my ID comments or ID score. The PEOPLE one has all my ID data but seems to have no connection to my WordPress account. This is going to be confusing for a lot of people. It would be good to see these profiles merged. I would like my avatar to display the WordPress badge and provide some sort of link to or indication of my WordPress presence but, also, display my IntenseDebate score.

IntenseDebate Blog : Moderation Whitelist and User Profile Update

Sun, 17 Jan 2010 00:19:20 +0000

With regard to whitelists, it would be good if I could opt to automatically whitelist commenters who have been whitelisted by a lot of other people - surely one of the main advantages of a distributed commenting system is that you gather the data necessary to form a "web of trust". It would also be good if some sort of translation functionality was built into the moderation interface - I often see comments that contain two languages: English that seems innocent/relevant enough, but then, also, a paragraph or two in some other language, clearly not spoken by the website owner or any of the other commenters. I generally presume it is some form of spam or propaganda, targeted at other speakers of that language, but it would be good to be able to check and ensure that I wasn't unfairly marking something as spam.

IntenseDebate Blog : Moderation Whitelist and User Profile Update

Sun, 17 Jan 2010 00:07:44 +0000

Heh, I was delighted when I appeared in a screenshot in the post a few months ago about copying permalinks xD

IntenseDebate Blog : New Pagination Settings: customize the number of comments per page

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 01:22:32 +0000

Nice move. One twist on this that might be good would be if you could make it conditional on how ID is performing that day - of course, your aim is to make ID lightening fast at all times but, realistically, there will always be times when the service struggles, at those times it would be neat if the setting could automatically jump back to 25 rather than make the page-load take an inordinate amount of time. In normal circumstances, however, 50 or 100 comments is great because users are much more likely to keep reading down a page rather than click through to a new one. Also, commenters on popular posts will feel happier than if their comment is knocked off the first page. Good all round (except on days when the service is slow!).

IntenseDebate Blog : Laughing Squid Joins the Debate

Tue, 1 Dec 2009 00:07:59 +0000

That's good news, congratulations, there's always something interesting to see on Laughing Squid but I've never bother to comment there before.

Laughing Squid : Vegetables Are All Your Body Needs

Tue, 1 Dec 2009 00:04:52 +0000

I can't help thinking that this, the whole thing including the body, would make a wonderful roast. Is that so very wrong of me? BTW, good to see that you've switched to IntenseDebate, it's a wonderful system.

Weblog Tools Collection : Is Automattic Evil?

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 13:02:10 +0000

Anyone who thinks that Automattic is evil either hasn't been paying attention or has a selfish agenda of their own. I am not easily impressed but I am impressed and intensely relieved that Matt has stuck to his guns and stayed true to the community, despite all the FUD that a small handful of malcontents have been throwing around. I am also impressed by his patience in repeatedly explaining what the GPL is and why WordPress, and all the advantages it gives each of us, could not exist without it. It is astonishing that some people cannot grasp the simple logic of what he is saying, that they keep rising up again and again, like zombies, to piss and moan because they think that WordPress owes them a living, and don't have the imagination to see how much the GPL is offering them on a plate. But the anti-GPL zombies don't matter, they can be ignored - in Matt, we've got a guy who really gets it, who isn't going to be swayed by shrill voices and is going to keep doing the right thing. WordPress is an incredible project, Automattic is a wonderful contributor to the project and we all benefit as a result.

IntenseDebate Blog : Give a little luv to your comments with the IntenseDebate CommentLuv Plugin

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 23:10:07 +0000

Great to see more plugins coming onstream. On the issue of nofollow, there is pretty strong evidence that Google does, in fact, follow links even when they are nofollow, giving some amount of Pagerank to sites that have a lot of nofollow links pointing at them. Yes, this pretty much defeats the purpose of nofollow, but Google has probably calculated that ignoring it helps make their index more accurate. I would guess that Google awards less Pagerank for nofollow links, but it does seem to award something, people are getting measurable results. Worth bearing in mind, anyway.

Stack Test : xczv

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 03:47:20 +0000

test

Stack Test : test

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 02:11:08 +0000

test 2

IntenseDebate Blog : New Plugins: AddThis and Facebook Share Buttons

Thu, 8 Oct 2009 20:42:27 +0000

Yeah, you really do! I've left a comment on the blog post announcing the AtD ID plugin, thank you and congratulations.

IntenseDebate Blog : After the Deadline IntenseDebate Plugin

Thu, 8 Oct 2009 20:40:13 +0000

Wow. Seriously: Wow!! This feature is an astonishingly useful addition to ID. A big "Hell, Yes!" to Michael, Raphael and the ID team. I have a few first impressions that I'd like to share: The "Checking Spelling" text changes to "Edit Comment" when you are in AtD mode - a more intuitive wording might be "Continue Writing". It would be helpful if the transition between both modes could be made more obvious. For instance, you could give the text field a very pale yellow background when in AtD mode, reverting back to white when returning to writing mode. It might also be a good idea to add an extra highlight to the "Continue Writing" button, to cue people who have accidentally entered AtD mode and are confused. You already have the transition between the two different labels but a slight color change or thin red border might make the change more obvious i.e. people will instantly know that the feature is "active". This is just a random wild thought but, if you could make the button reflect the current mode more clearly, you could probably afford to lose the text labels altogether and just have the spell-check icon - just give it an obvious highlight when in editing mode, no need for the text, people will get the idea and it's generally better to avoid text in the UI if you can anyway. Removing the text would also leave more room for other plugin icons, thereby increasing the number of site owners who opt to use AtD. The ID AtD implementation seems to be better than the one on WordPress.com, because it is quite easy to end up with some parts of the post field in WP containing the AtD red underlines even when you are back in writing mode, which might be a tad confusing for some people, not sure which mode they are currently in. So, the ID implementation seems a lot cleaner in that respect. There does seem to be a slight bug when, within AtD mode, you click on a misspelling to see the AtD suggestions but don't pick one and return to writing mode. This sometimes leaves some extraneous text. For instance, I ended one of the above paragraphs with the words "site owners who opt to use AtD". In AtD mode, I was amused to see that the abbreviation "AtD" is not recognized, so, I clicked on it to see what alternatives it suggested. When I returned to writing mode, that sentence changed to "site owners who opt to use AtD.suggest(this);">AtD", clearly some sort of artifact from my use of the pop-up menu. This occurs in both Safari and Chrome under OS X, but not FireFox. Again, thank you so much for continuing to improve ID, it is exciting to think about where Automattic will be in six months time with innovators such as AtD and ID onboard.

IntenseDebate Blog : New Plugins: AddThis and Facebook Share Buttons

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 16:59:43 +0000

Another super useful plugin or even standard feature for ID would be one based upon Automattic's latest acquisition, After the Deadline, the contextual spelling and grammar checker. I've been banging on about this elsewhere, but I believe that their current focus on correcting posts is actually less useful than correcting comments, which tend to be written more quickly and, therefore, contain more mistakes. Better comments would make comments more enjoyable to read, increasing the number of people who bother to read them, increasing the average amount of time spent on ID-based sites and encouraging more people to become commenters themselves.

IntenseDebate Blog : New Plugins: AddThis and Facebook Share Buttons

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 16:54:36 +0000

That's interesting, CommentLuv is very popular and has, I think, won a few awards. As far as I can tell, PollDaddy's Rating widget is for posts rather than comments. The potential that I am interested in is where, like Amazon or TripAdvisor, you allow users to simultaneously comment and vote, tied to their ID identities, which both encourages participation and makes the overall score (for whatever product or service everyone is rating) harder to manipulate. The arguments against giving each commenter the opportunity to submit star-ratings - possibly even several different start ratings, one for each aspect of the service or product they are reviewing - is that it would be quite resource-intensive, pretty hard on the database to have to repeatedly pull all those scores for display every time the page was rendered. The argument for it is that users like rating things, it can be used to entice them into participation, readers like to scan through star-rated reviews i.e. quickly checking all the one-star reviews in case there are validate arguments against the service/product and, most importantly, harnessing all those users' opinions and distilling them down to simple overall star-ratings is a very valuable and highly condensed / highly consumable piece of user-generated content. I have no doubt that one of the three main distributed commenting systems will introduce star-ratings as an option in the future, but CPU costs might need to come down quite a bit first for it to be feasible, or perhaps someone will work out a way to let the commenting system receive and display ratings appear within each ID comment but actually be stored on and pulled from the site owner's own server / hosting account.

IntenseDebate Blog : New Plugins: AddThis and Facebook Share Buttons

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 03:51:52 +0000

Great to see more plugins starting to emerge, the plugin system really is ID's silver bullet. Would be great to see some sort of rating and review plugin, similar to the excellent GD Star Rating WordPress plugin, that would add a whole new purpose to comments and being part of the ID universe would make people much more likely to share their reviews and consumer experiences.

IntenseDebate Blog : Slick New User Account Pages

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 06:39:11 +0000

Thanks Isaac, great to see how responsive you guys are to your users. That is also the first time I've ever received a reply by video comment :D Keep up the good work, I am really excited about how ID is evolving.

IntenseDebate Blog : Slick New User Account Pages

Sat, 12 Sep 2009 17:43:34 +0000

I hadn't noticed the "Already cool?" login prompt, that doesn't really work, lacks class and comes across as arrogant, suggesting that people who have not yet joined are not yet cool.

IntenseDebate Blog : Coming Soon to an IntenseDebate Comment Section Near You

Fri, 21 Aug 2009 01:18:11 +0000

So impressed that you took the time to give us a sneak peak at what you're working on; although not as obviously important as focusing on the code, this sort of inside report - or, as Matt would call it, "fluffy PR" ;) - helps to keep us excited about IntenseDebate and we will communicate that excitement to others. In particular, this news addresses some of the concerns people have had about using distributed commenting systems and equips us to more effectively argue the case for IntenseDebate. The Tweetmeme plugin is pretty cool too, good to see new plugins starting to appear, thanks!

IntenseDebate Blog : New IntenseDebate Plugin - TweetMeme!

Thu, 20 Aug 2009 13:30:33 +0000

Will ID be supporting the retweeting of individual comments, as described today in this TechCrunch article: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/19/what-if-comm... ... I would see that as being an ideal fit with the way in which the ID system already encourages comments of higher quality, this would be an additional encouragement.

IntenseDebate Blog : WP e-Commerce Plugin Integration

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 17:32:09 +0000

That is good news - unified commenting will encourage more consumers to leave product feedback, giving smaller online retailers a chance to compete against Amazon's user-generated product reviews.