New Comment System

The comments are different. More on this later today. Should be fun.

Check out Intense Debate to learn more in the meantime.

http://www.intensedebate.com/images/intense_debate_logo.png

UPDATE:

Ok, so here’s the deal. WordPress (the engine that drives this beast of a website) has a pretty terrible comment system. No avatars, no ratings, no profiles, no threads, etc, etc. It’s just bad. I’ve added some functionality to it (like threading) but it’s still hard to tell who’s saying what to whom and harder still to get to know regular commenters on the site. I want to foster the sense of community developing around Hijinks Ensue and I think commenting has to be fun and friendly to make that a reality.

Enter Intense Debate. Basically ID replaces the default WordPress comment system with a better one.

2008-02-13-intense-debate-preview

Features:

  • Threaded comments
  • RSS feeds per comment thread OR PER USER!
  • Emailed Updates
  • User Friends
  • User Profiles with avatars, and links to your other social networks
  • User rankng system with D&D XP or some such nonsense!
  • Your profile follows you to other blogs using ID (no one is using it so don’t worry about this)

Signing Up:

If you are a regular commenter, I suggest you sign up with ID. It takes about 30 seconds and has some pretty cool benefits for interacting with other Hijinks Ensue readers.

The coolest part is that you can sign up with your OpenID. You probably have one and don’t know it. Sites like Yahoo, Flickr, Livejournal and pretty much everyone else use OpenID.

You can also choose to NOT sign up and comment just like always by typing in your nick and email address. The best part is if you ever decide to sign up you get to inherit all your previous comments.

The End Result:

I’m going to try this for at least a couple of weeks. If it sucks I can import all the ID comments back into WordPress and get rid of ID.

You guys are going to decide if this is the way we want to go. Try it out, put ID through its paces and let me know what you think.

All comments on posts prior to TODAY will remain WordPress standard comments. ID says you can import them, but I don’t trust that feature yet so I am leaving well enough alone in that respect. If this takes off, I may contact them about importing and somehow trying to associate previous comments with current commenters.

Twitter and Livejournal

I’ve added a Twitter link to the sidebar. Follow my tweets if you like. I am hoping to use this to relay comic progress updates, and sneak peaks to regular readers. Mostly it will be me complaining about procrastinating.

If you are reading this on Livejournal, I have some badish news. The WordPress plugin that I use to cross post to LJ (LJXP) doesn’t work well with the newest version of WordPress. As you may have noticed, it double posts all the time and I have to go in and manually delete the extras. It’s very frustrating and is ruining the LJ experience for me.

I really value everyone that discovered this site on LJ and all the great comments I get. I do not want to lose that. Until I figure out a better solution, please befriend the LJ Syndication Feed and comment HERE on the site (not the LJ feed, since I won’t be notified).  You can also add the plain old RSS feed to your feed reader of choice.

Don’t remove HijinksComic from your LJ friends, since I am going to try and find a better solution. LJ Readers, feel free to comment on this post on Livejournal and share any thoughts.

New fun stuff

I added some new features to the site with some great WordPress plugins. Now when you make a comment on a post you can subscribe to that post’s comments via email. Let me know if it doesn’t work.

I also added a contact form to the contact page.

My very good friend Daniel is a father today. To clarify, he was not one yesterday. I would be a super way to congratulate him if you checked out his photoblog, Arranging Light, and bought a print of one of his awesome photos. There are photos of trees and skies and animals and boobs. I swear they will make you happy.

Thursday’s comic will almost certainly be posted on Friday due to H.I.B.L. (Holiday Induced Bastard Laziness). It’s a serious affliction that, if not treated, can lead to C.L.A.S. (Chronic Laziness Asstard Syndrome).

HijiNKS Ensue is del.icio.us

So is bacon. I should have a site called: http://baco.nisdelicio.us

You will notice at the bottom of each comic and blog post, there is now a “Share This” button. Using the excellent wordpress plugin of the same name, made by this nice man, you are now able to easily bookmark, digg and email HijiNKS Ensue Geek Comics to your friends the enemies.

Here’s what it looks like:

del.icio.us geek comic

I’m finishing up the new comic right now and hope to have it up tomorrow morning. Keep the emails and comments coming. Join the email updates list by emailing me at comics at hijinksensue dawt comz and make sure to add the Geek Comic RRS feed to your RSS thing.