DISQUS

Cool! Any experience with Heroku? Have heard very good things about htem too, not sure if their service is similar/comparable.

Personally, I would rather see it on a separate links page. You could turn it into a resource with some of the other links you have posted in your blog as well =)

Sid Savara's last blog post..The Curse of the Worst Acceptable Solution

I think this depends on the job, and the level of trust the client has in your abilities. If you're talking about multiple man month projects in particular, I agree it's flat out irresponsible to claim you'll do it for X dollars in Y days with Z vague requirements.

Interesting. I had one day where I dropped to virtually no subscribers, and I had a similar thought. Initially I panicked - had I just offended everyone and alienated my reader base?

Fortunately it turned out to not be the case, and all is well ;)

<abbr>Sid Savaras last blog post..Why 3% of Harvard MBAs Make Ten Times as Much as the Other 97% Combined</abbr>

I wonder how many other developers have built their own little app to do the same thing. Now all you need is a way to grab tweets into a log and tail it, and you're in business...

I wonder how many other developers have built their own little app to do the same thing. Now all you need is a way to grab tweets into a log and tail it, and you're in business...

Sadly it's so true - if someone visits a site and is turned off by the design, they'll never read the content. On the other hand, I think this is good opportunity to succeed where your competitors don't - building a slick, functional, and easily accessible website automatically puts you ahead of many people.

The "halo effect" is particularly interesting - I wonder whether this also affects you if you have been visiting a blog for a while, that you enjoy for information alone, and the design is just ok - and they then update their design. Perhaps you'll start to take them more seriously, and assume they've become more successful.

<abbr>Sid Savaras last blog post..Why 3% of Harvard MBAs Make Ten Times as Much as the Other 97% Combined</abbr>

I noticed that as well, I always use SSL - so much of my life is controlled by email. I recognize that the risk might be minimal, but the prevention is equally painless - so why not just leave it in SSL mode all the time and at least make it challenging for someone to steal it.

This just in - Sid Savara registers mindfox.com

Kidding ;). I think it's definitely a tradeoff - I constantly curse at my FF and/or Flock for running slow and bloated, but at the same time I really love all the extensions I use. For me, the instability, the occasional "white tab of nothingness" etc is worth it to be able to customize my browser as much as I do.

<abbr>Sid Savaras last blog post..Why 3% of Harvard MBAs Make Ten Times as Much as the Other 97% Combined</abbr>

Personally, I think you need to be able to offer both. As an advertiser, I don't care whether you're figuring out the searcher's intention, or whether based on keywords I can figure out their intention - all I care about is when I get 1 buying customer for every X dollars I spend on ads, am I making enough to justify bidding on the ad - whether it's a "concept", keyword, or whatever. I think at some point though with all the data being collected about surfing habits, there will be amazing granularity - like, show my ad to someone who just visited Nike.com and now is searching for "running shoes" - because as an advertiser, perhaps I know that that's where I can make a sale.

Interesting that delicious didn't make the list - I know it's not strictly note taking, but I basically tag my notes with a specific tag (if the note is a task or something to do with the website) and then process them every couple days - filing them away as needed, or in some cases just leaving the note on the site itself as reference.

Great post! I am very surprised at the level of success she has, not because I doubt her, but because it is very very hard to get people involved in a personal blog of someone they don't even know. At least you and me have a common interest - reading your blog is educational, I learn things I can apply. But I don't even read my some of my friends' personal blogs, they're terrible ;). Kudos to her!

BTW, your footer appears to not be working anymore, it says:

We are planning to write more posts about "" next week. Subscribe to the RSS feed for getting informed about it. (nothing inside the quotes - I'm guessing it should show either a category or a tag)

<abbr>Sid Savaras last blog post..Why 3% of Harvard MBAs Make Ten Times as Much as the Other 97% Combined</abbr>

Thanks for searching all over and finding the best posts! I had skimmed the copy blogger one about online marketing success, but after your recommendation I decided to go back for a deeper look, and you're right - it was definitely worth a read.

Wow a CEO spends 60-70% of his time fundraising? I expected it to be high, but I was expecting more in the range of 30%ish. Although I suppose really any time spent briefing people, evangelizing the product, etc could be considered as fundraising depending on how you categorize it.

Hehe, I actually like the posts that are a little "too" intimate as you said, but I agree with you - people who post so often that they down out the rest of the people I am trying to follow are in for a quick unfriending/unfollowing ;)

Sid Savaras last blog post..Leveraging Expertise - On The Shoulders Of Giants

So, happy to report back - success! It appears it must have been a DISQUS issue, as it is all working now that I've upgraded. Was considering emailing you, but I felt it would be good to have it in a comment for anyone using DISQUS who might be concerned. It works great.

I will report back if there are any further issues. So far, so good.

Also, FYI, there is del.icio.us and now there is delicious.com. I went ahead and added it manually in my plugin, perhaps you may want to consider adding it as another default entry.

Ahhh! Comment preview ate my comment!

So basically what I said was that DISQUS and SezWho are pretty similar I guess - one big difference is blogs I read already had DISQUS, so I went with them. Also, DISQUS has upmod/downmod versus ratings, and I am not sure which is better/worse.

Cool, if I make any changes I will send them to you and let you know =). I probably won't get to anything for quite a while as I'm working on my content for my blog and have a hectic schedule for the next few weeks, but this is my favorite new plugin!

Any updates on this one? This is a pretty cool idea. I think wrapping it up in a plugin with a "default lite" theme would probably be sufficient - and maybe at the top a little message telling users hey, this is a optimized theme, heavy load! Come back to see the regular site =)

I actually had a bit of the opposite train of thought regarding the "taking over your comments." It is true, DISQUS has them all on their servers. The new version (2.0) syncs it with both your blog and their servers, however I liked the idea of being able to go to DISQUS.com and seeing all my comments I had made EVERYWHERE and also being able to just reply in thread. That way I don't have to check every blog I comment on.

For example (and this is an example, not trying to convince you) if you used DISQUS, I always have my dashboard open. I would be able to see you replying to my comments there, and reply there. Or, if I am somewhere away from a computer, I can reply via email, even though it's your blog and not mine, because it's all DISQUS powered. Right now, I have to keep coming back here to comment.

My hope is that someday many blogs will be disqus powered, and I won't have to keep returning to the webpage to reply - just reply from my blackberry, or from the dashboard. I also like the fact that anyone can view my profile on disqus and see wherever I have commented (though I am not really taking advantage of that feature much, since few blogs so far are DISQUS powered relative to how many I read)

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Topic switch!

I agree with making any new features "advanced options" - don't want to make the plugin TOO complicated. Other users may be intimidated by it otherwise!

Another feature request - Is there a way to also have a default "noscript" type thing? Like if someone has JS turned off, I want to always show them a "welcome to my blog, please subscribe!" message. Right now (I believe) the "default" message only shows if it does a cookie check in JS.

I know some PHP, JS, etc - if you would like to give me access to it (you would own everything - it's your plugin) I would be happy to work with you on it. I know I can edit the PHP right now, but if you have a source control system somewhere we could use that - or I can just edit and email you changes. So far I have not done anything to it.

@Thaya

Sure I will try it out tonight and report back by this weekend on the DISQUS issue! I have been using "What Would Seth Godin Do" as a replacement, but I think your plugin is superior - more granularity, and Javascript checking versus server side comparison.

I have not tried SezWho, is that what you are using? I basically use DISQUS because a few blogs I read were using it, and it allows you to reply via email to any new comment or replies, and that becomes a blog comment (which I thought would be great, since I always have my blackberry). That said, SezWho may have the same functionality.

I think that what you and I are talking about are two slightly different features. I think your way would be MUCH more powerful (and might be a little scary for users ;) "I know you like my blog, and you've read these 5 pages, but not this 6th one, Welcome! MWAHAHAHA". What I was suggesting was just a simple counter like "what would seth godin do" where it shows the message the first 5 times, and then stops harassing them =).

I'm sure whatever you put into the plugin will be excellent though - it's super polished. I'll probably write a review of it on my blog at some point. Or maybe I should keep it a secret for myself ;)

Thanks for pointing these out. I especially love reading post mortems - it's easy to say what you did right when you're a success, but I think we all learn more from reading about critical mistakes made by others.

Wow Jack! I am a huge fan of Darren Rowse and of your site as well. This is amazing. I was just thinking myself, if I had a half hour of Darren's time what would I ask him. I haven't had a chance to watch all of it yet, but I'm planning on setting aside some time this evening to do so!

<abbr>Sid Savara - Personal Developments last blog post..Are You Really Working - or Just Using Metawork as an Excuse to Avoid Real Work?</abbr>

Cool! That site is great. I am going to go use some of their other freeware icons =). You did a great job matching the icon with your main logo design - it all looks really good with similar styles.

I really love the new RSS Feed icon as well, it's awesome. Is that creative commons'ed as well? Would totally understand if it's not. Did you create that?

Hi Thaya,

BTW, the day after I made the comment, DISQUS released 2.0 of their plugin. So I installed it, and am first making sure that's solid. It appears to be.

I am going to try out WP-Greetbox with it again when I get home today, in case they have fixed the issue. Also, here is the thread where I told them of the issue:

http://disqus.disqus.com/ie_issues_with_wordpre...

Interesting, other people also have had issues

It appears DISQUS and various other plugins also had issues, so I don't think the issue is isolated to WP-Greetbox - it's probably just one of those things where they are doing JS one way, and you (and other plugins) are trying to load another way. Or something - I am not as skilled at JS as you are =)

A feature request also - this may make the plugin more complex, but since we are tracking cookies, would it be possible to show the visitor different things depending on whether they are returning from the same referring domain?

For example, a delicious user visiting who has visited multiple times or something - they may just have it bookmarked.