Added comments, new bookmarking, BSA asynchronous ad code

Posted February 17th, 2010 in Miscellaneous Postings

This is a quick post to talk about some changes I made to my blog last night. These include adding comments using Disqus, replacing the Add to Any bookmarking and subscribe widgets with static buttons, and changing the Buy Sell Ads over to the non-blocking, asynchronous ad code.

Comments using Disqus

My blog has never had comments and it's something I've been wanting to remedy for a while now. Unfortunately because it's something I've coded myself adding comments is something I'd have to program myself and I always have something else more important to do. (See the note below about SilverStripe).

I decided today that in order to get comments going ASAP that I'd use Disqus, which is a Javascript plug-in to show comments on the page. Disqus has some other useful features such as integration with Facebook and Twitter and being able to log in using some other services.

So those are now live and you'll see the Disqus comment system at the end of this post after the share and bookmark, subsribe or follow links.

Replaced Add to Any with static links

The Add to Any links were a Javascript widget for adding bookmarks, sharing links, and subscribing via various services. I've removed this to help with page load speed (which is countered somewhat by adding Disqus, but then Disqus seems to be asynchronous) and replaced with some "static" links to the most popular services. I think the end result makes it somewhat tidier and cleaner.

Changed Buy Sell Ads over to non-blocking, asynchronous ad code

Buy Sell Ads have created non-blocking, asynchronous ad code to replace the existing way of serving ads. Changing this over makes the page feel like it loads heaps faster because the page can continue rendering instead of waiting for BSA to do its thing.

You can read more about this at the Buy Sell Ads blog. If you use BSA, I highly recommend changing over to this new way of serving ads.

Changeover to SilverStripe

I haven't changed the site over to SilverStripe although I have made mention recently about changing the site over at some stage. Now that I've added comments with Disqus one of the issues surrounding this blog has been solved although I am still intending moving it over at some stage, but it may not be for a while yet.

Site design

Other than the changes noted above, I haven't made any other changes to the design or HTML markup but I do need to do some work here. Given my day job is to create websites you'd think the HTML behind my own site would be better; on the whole it's not too bad but there's a fair amount of inline CSS that shouldn't be there as I've bolted things on and later removed them etc.

Whenever I do move over to SilverStripe I'll obviously address these issues and may look at moving some of the stuff out of the sidebar into a separate footer.