by Believe it or not this little part of the internet has now been going for 3 years and for the most I’ve been happy with the format and style of our news and review but there’s one thing that’s alwys irked me. The lack of comments.
Sites thrive on interaction and even though some might say the age of the blog is coming to an end and that microblogging, snapchat and Tumblr style writing is the future, I’ve always wanted more interaction between the reviews and the readers.
For a while I relied on JetPack, part of wordpress, for comments but that didn’t really seem to muster much interaction not to mention being slow and boggy. So after weighing up the options, DISQUS seems to be a popular choice so the sites going with that.
Right now all previous comments have just finished importing over as we go seeing your comments encourages us all here to post more and push more for the hardware and review you want to see.
EssentialMac is also moving to new servers. Since MediaTemple were taken over by GoDaddy the inevitable has happened. Prices have gone up and the servers have gone slower. This means the bounce rate for us has gone up considerably which is unacceptable. No one wants to wait for website to load, ourselves included.
DNS settings have changed and files are being copied and the downtime should be minimal but should the site be unaccessable.. Don’t Panic the site isn’t going anywhere. 😀
Great choice, I’ve moved over to Disqus myself and love how the comment system works! 🙂
Quick question — how have you liked Disqus so far? I’ve been looking at a number of comment systems, and while I (obviously) have a Disqus account, not everyone does. Another site did a pretty extensive survey (as in hundreds of readers) and found that people would rather just enter name and email than have to sign in to a service.
Thoughts?
Hey Bruce, The main advantage is that its one sign up, multiple sites rather than having to do a registration for every site. The name and email method I just found to end up being nothing but spam fodder.
Also worth mention is that in the few years the site has been up and running comments were few and far between. With Disqus theres been a significant improvement. not great but an improvement none the less.
Hope this helps