The new Blogger interface finally supports sufficient column widths to permit my favored layout, so I’m experimenting with going to it and using Disqus. Expect an amount of chaos today. I’m trying to figure out how to turn off the requirement to provide an email address in order to comment; if I can’t, I’ll just trash the whole experiment again.
UPDATE: Thus far, the new interface permits a much better blog search and blog archive functions. So that’s good. Still figuring out how to recreate some of the other functions, though. And the interface for modifying text and text colors in the gadgets is really poor; it insists upon using the same color for the post bodies as well as on the sidebars. This is a problem if one is light and the other is dark.
UPDATE II: Disqus says the following: “Can I remove the email requirement for Guest commenting?
No, Guest commenters are required to provide an email address for notifications and moderation purposes, however the email address will of course never be displayed and does not require verification.”
UPDATE III: I have no idea why IntenseDebate was showing up before and now is not showing up. Or why these Blogger comments look so different than they do on Alpha Game. Or why no one seems to be able to DESIGN A FREAKING COMMENT SYSTEM THAT JUST WORKS. I still miss that original one, whatever it was called. It worked better five years ago than anything I’ve seen lately.
UPDATE IV: And I have officially exhausted the amount of effort I am willing to expend upon “improving” the blog structure. The classic template may be ancient and creaky, CoComment may be quirky and buggy, but it works better than the up-to-date alternatives. There is no point in breaking things simply to make use of comment systems I like even less than what I’ve got.