Monday, December 01, 2008
Pybloxsom and IntenseDebate
We've wanted comments on this blog for a while - comments help to build a community. I've tried comments on my other website before, but they've always filled up with two different types of spam. The first type, normal spam, was easy to combat. A combination of Akismet and JavaScript magic cut it down to a level I could manually handle. The second type was from my students, who insisted on making ridiculous comments on months old articles, making them hard to track down.
This last weekend I sat down for a few hours to try to get commenting working again. PyBlosxom, the software that powers this website, has a wonderful commenting plugin that supports emailing new comments to you and providing you with the ability to manually approve comment. Unfortunately, our hosting provider doesn't provide easy access to an smtp server to set up email. I ended up spending a long time trying to trick the plugin into authenticating with Gmail's smtp server and sending email that way. No luck. Another day or two might have done it, but this will be a busy week. I'd need to push it off until the weekend. I thought I'd explore other options.
I'd been wanting to use Disqus for a while. It gives us more advanced features to help make comments feel more interactive and more like a conversation. But there isn't a Disqus plugin for Pyblosxom. Disqus does offer an API, so it should be possible to write a plugin to do what we need, but before this weekend I'd never touched Python. Then I stumbled on IntenseDebate. Rather than provide an API, they simply give you some JavaScript. It was beautiful.
Right after school today, I sat down and in a half hour modified another plugin to work with IntenseDebate. Aside from a ridiculously dumb error I made (note to self - find time and money to mirror the blog so that I don't make changes on a live server), it was totally painless. So now we have comments. With lots of features. Not only can we batch approve comments, but comments can be threaded (you can respond to a particular comment), comments are emailed to us immediately, and we can approve comments without directly connecting to our server.
Keep in mind that in order to combat both types of spam we'll be manually approving all comments. Not only does this mean that it might take a day or two (At worst) for your comment to show up, but that if the material isn't appropriate, it will just be deleted.
Feel free to grab the Plugin on my other website. When you save the file, don't forget to add the .py extension.
Please email if there are any commenting problems! And thank you IntenseDebate, for making commenting ridiculously painless.
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| posted at: 16:11 |
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