It Was Intense But The Debate Is Over!

It's been a few months now, and I have to say we gave it our best try. But much to our disappointment the Intense Debate comment system has officially gotten the boot.

Lisa had been using the Intense Debate comment system for all the reasons we covered in our previous post about it (here). While we are sad to part with all these cool toys and lovely integration with the blog, the ever illusive bugs just became more than Lisa (or I) could bear (to keep fixing). Even when, after weeks of missing comments from readers using Internet Explorer and the bug suddenly managing to fix itself...sort of, Lisa would still get emails from time to time reminding her otherwise. The list of other nuisances and quirky issues eventually became too erratic to keep up with. Ultimately it got to a point where Internet Explorer readers couldn't even access the blog. An error message would pop up as the page was loading and redirect them somewhere else. We removed the Intense Debate widget and...whalla, no problems. Put the widget back in and...Bam, no access to the blog. That was just more than Lisa could bear, and even though she gave it a few days to correct itself, the stream of emails alerting her to the problem tipped the scale. (good looking out you guys!)

Now if you're not familiar with Intense Debate you might be asking why we didn't just up and leave a long time ago. If it were only so easy! The fact is, I actually wrote this post nearly 4 weeks ago in preparation for our departure, but patience (or was it procrastination) kept us hanging on a little longer. Not to mention that all the while, looming over our head was the knowledge that returning to the Blogger commenting system would require an incredible undertaking of manual labor. You see, contrary to what we were led to believe, returning to Blogger's commenting system with all your comments from Intense Debate neatly packaged and in tact, is for us at the moment nothing more than a misguided hope. (Now I understand the meaning of comment hijacking!)

The truth is we only had 2 options in our departure. 1. Switch off Intense Debate and say goodbye to all the comments that have been posted in the past few months. or 2. Manually re-type (or copy/paste) all the comments from the past few months from Intense Debate into Blogger, manually adding all the necessary links to others' blogs (arghhh!) If you've been around Lisa C's for a while you already know that there really was only 1 option. So over the next few days weeks we'll be moving all comments back in the Blogger commenting system.

Fortunately, around every dark cloud is a silver lining. This new transition also comes at an excellent time to take advantage of the new partnership of Entrecard and SezWho.
Equally as exciting was the announcement that Blogger was introducing a new commenting feature - Embeddable comments. Integration of this new feature means that when you click on the comment button below (make sure you try it before you go), the post page will open and the comments will appear within the design of the blog (instead of Blogger's standard bland comment page). This makes the divorce from Intense Debate much less painful for Lisa since one of the features she was most disappointed to let go of was the aesthetic appeal of ID. If you've got a blogger hosted blog, and would like to try this layout for your comments, it's a pretty easy change. Pay a visit to Annie at Blogger University for detailed instructions, as she does a great job explaining some additional steps you'll need to take if your template has been heavily tweaked.

Hopefully (for Intense Debate) they'll be spotted by Google, scooped up and straightened out on their course. Until then this is our long kiss goodbye!

Posted by D., - Lisa's Husband