Blog Design Studio

Around 30 odd hours before, I did the best thing for my blog. I installed IntenseDebate WordPress plugin on my blog. Although, this takes away the beautiful comment form (for which we’ve been featured as well) still it was worth putting the plugin as it gives various other features which make my life simple. In another news, IntenseDebate became available for everyone.

Why is IntenseDebate so useful?

1. Comment Threading – Although, there are plug-ins that allow creating threaded comments, however there are other features in IntenseDebate that makes it better than those plugins.

2. Social features – This feature is particularly some thing that I like. This gives us an idea that how exactly a person is contributing and where all he is active. IntenseDebate allows you to follow user and thus lets you discover new blogs that may be of your niche.

3. Subscribe to comments – This plug-in also allows the commenter to stay in touch with conversation as they can follow the conversation as well.

4. Reply from DashBoard – One of the wonderful features of IntenseDebate is that it allows me to reply to the comments directly through WordPress Dashboard. It displays that if I’ve replied to a particular comment or not and thus keeps me on toes all the time to ensure that I engage in conversation with my readers.

5. Automatic backup – Because IntenseDebate syncs all the comments between itself and my blog, all the comments can be exported and thus it will help all those users who lose comments while shifting the blog engine.

6. Controls Spam – IntenseDebate scans the comments through Akismet and its own spam filters to ensure that no spam comment passes through to reach to your blog.

7. RSS Tracking, Twitter and lot more – IntenseDebate is integrated with RSS feeds tracking and allows you to send an automatic tweet on every comment made (although, I’ll avoid it as it will be considered as tweet spamming).

Well, the list doesn’t end over here. There are features like pagination of comments, in case there are lots of comments on the blog, ability to sort the comments, support for gravatar, various blog widgets, reputation points and still a lot more features. In short you just can’t avoid this plug-in. I know there are various other services like IntenseDebate however, I chose this as Automattic recently acquired it and thus it makes sense to use this instead of others.

There are some bugs that I noticed -

1. Comment Moderation panel – IntenseDebate enhances the moderation of comments, although the comment moderation panel doesn’t look that good. The comments that are awaiting moderation are displayed in the comments section itself and the awaiting moderation section shows the count Zero all the time.

2. It showed the email address as same for spam comments – Aravind Jose is the top commenter of this blog and unfortunately, it showed his email address as the spam commenter’s email address. I got surprised at first, then I realized that it is a possible bug.

Apart from these two small issues, I don’t think that there is any other problem you’ll experience with IntenseDebate. It works like a charm and it’ll give you every other reason to fall in love with it. I have to say that this will be the best thing you’ll do for your blog as well. Install it right now!