No comment?

The remodeling isn't done yet, but it's progressing.

I finally figured out that in order to get Disqus commenting back to keeping visible comment counts, I was going to have to load a fresh XML template instead of one I'd done anything with, which meant completely rebuilding my little tower of code/widget blocks and re-doing the three-column template mod.

Disqus is working perfectly now. It's a sweet system. You can comment as a guest or use your Disqus, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo or OpenID login. It lets me control the order of comment display -- I prefer "oldest first," an option that those other guys (see below) say I don't need and can't have.

The bad news is that the old comments may be gone for good. I've imported them twice now and I'm not seeing them. Maybe there's a database refresh or something that has to occur first, or maybe they're just toast. I hate that, as there are some pretty cool set-tos I'd rather keep available, but if they're gone they're gone.

Either way, I don't blame Disqus -- I blame JS-Kit.





JS-Kit took over a perfectly good commenting service (Haloscan).

They could have made their money on ads in the comment forms, etc.

They could have required an upgrade to Haloscan Premium (it used to go for $12/year) if it was about the money.

But noooooooo -- they proffered an "upgrade" (Echo) that's inferior to the previous system and gave their customers the choice of coughing up $9.95 per year for it and giving up its better predecessor, or switching systems altogether. They should change their name to JS-WTF or JS-Asshat or something more appropriate.

We paid for the Echo "upgrade" over at Rational Review. My mistake. It's garbage, and I've put "replace with Disqus or Intense Debate" on my near future to-do list (my only problem with Intense Debate is that their Blogger-specific comment import hangamajigger is offline for repairs at the moment ... but Rational Review is a WordPress installation).

And that's all I have to say about that. For now.