For a number of years, I have been publishing all my posts to my own hosted blog (first WordPress and then I migrated it all to Drupal) as insurance against social networks disappearing (which they all will eventually) so I have a good 15,000 to 20,000 posts now which are searchable in one place.
Commenting has been a bit difficult for followers there though as I had to enable registration and later anti-spam measures to keep the spam out. No-one wants to register to make a once-off comment on a site they may not come back to later.
So I’m trialling out Disqus now which will give commenters the following advantages now:
1. It’s universal so if you have ever registered once elsewhere with Disqus you just continue here without a new registration.
2. Easily authenticate with social logins such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter.
3. You can vote others’ comments up or down.
4. You can easily reshare the post or even an individual comment to the social network you logged in with.
5. You can sort comments.
6. You can like a discussion.
7. Going to Disqus itself at any time with show you all comments you have made across various websites and you can tailor notifications (or stop them) there.
Comments will work on any posts I see (even older ones) but you have to click on the post title to open it and comment. The newest post I see is displaying the Disqus comments in the list view, but for some reason, the other posts in the list view are not showing the comments until you open the post (a teething issue I will need to sort out). This is a bit annoying and I’m trying to find a fix for it. The idea is you should be able to scroll down the list view of blog posts and see whether there are comments or not.
With Google+ soon set to shut down I don’t expect many people will be physically visiting my blog site every day to keep up with any posts if you are not on social media (such as MeWe, Facebook, Mastodon, Twitter, Diaspora, Friendica, Tumblr, Hubzilla, Blogger, SocialHome, Minds) then you can try the following to just get headlines:
1. E-mail subscription at https://mailchi.mp/8e13efeb48c4/gadgeteerza.
2. RSS Feed at https://gadgeteer.co.za/rss.xml – there are also free Android and iOS RSS apps that will allow you to track updates from various sites like this without having to visit them.
See my blog at https://gadgeteer.co.za/blog
#disqus #blog #gadgeteerza