Today, Sam over at CostPerNews scooped the world on the news that the Seesmic/Disqus integration is finally complete. Sam, are you following Loren as Loic’s most recent houseguest?
The guys over at Disqus have been delivering some steady improvements to the Disqus platform, and video comments are by far the most significant. Previously, they announced some improved popup profile information as well as inline editing of submitted comments. There may be more that I’ve missed.
I miss these updates because here on Jangro.com because I’m using the Disqus wordpress plugin that is based on their API instead of using Javascript integration to load up the comments. The Disqus guys are not keeping that version of the plugin up-to-date with the new features.
What’s this API version of the plugin? When you integrate with Wordpress, you have two choices of plugins to grab from Disqus.
The Javascript plugin is a “client-side” integration. When your blog post is served up, there’s some javascript code runs in the reader’s browser that goes off and grabs any comments from the Disqus service, very much like how Adsense works. If you look at the source of a page with this on it, you won’t actually see any of the comment text. It’s loaded after the page is rendered using Javascript code that fetches the content from Disqus.
The API, Beta version does this calling to the Disqus service on the server-side, before the page is sent down to the browser. This means that the comment text gets sent down as HTML along with the blog post.
If you’ve followed my love affair with Disqus, you know that it started with an evaluation of third party comment system plugins. A major factor, if not THE major factor, that had me choose Disqus was this server-side integration.
In my opinion, comments are the life-blood of an active blog and not only do they show readers that there’s a vibrant community behind a blog, it gives search engines more to work with. This becomes especially important as the blog content itself becomes less and less text-rich with video and audio podcasts.
Search engines cannot see the comments rendered with the Javascript plugin. They do see the comments displayed via the API version of the plugin.
The Javascript implementation does have its benefits. In addition to ease of integration and feature updates, the fact that comment text is unavailable to search engines means that comment spam is rendered completely ineffective. There are other ways to accomplish this, and for now, I’m uncomfortable with using a full Javascript implementation.
I may change my mind down the road, especially if the Disqus guys abandon the API version of the plugin and force a decision on me.
I do hope the bring it up to date and give us the choice.
