Blog Stuff And Facebook Integration

When I looked at starting a new blog I didn’t want a repeat of my previous blogs. I still have the majority of the posts from them all and two of them are still up as I believe many of the posts are still useful to people, but one of the main reasons I stopped posting on them is due to the amount of comment spam I got.

I tried a few solutions to reduce the number of comments I needed to moderate, but even with some of the anti-spam services out there I was still getting way too many to cope with on a daily basis.

As a Facebook developer, I was interested to see the release of the new external commenting system for sites. While some of the cons (single point of failure, external dependency, need a facebook account to comment currently) are potentially deal breakers to many, I don’t see them as such a huge problem. The majority of my friends have Facebook accounts and while a couple of them work at businesses that block Facebook commenting isn’t essential to their or my business at present and if it did become so, I might be persuaded to migrate to something else. The pros however are fairly compelling. It allows ease of discovery of my posts via facebook wall posts, it should reduce spam by forcing users to have a valid facebook account and it is easy enough to build into more complex systems due to the Facebook API.

So far, besides my inexperienced Wordpress hacking, I have not really noticed any real teething troubles with the implementation. The page load is slightly slower than the native Wordpress commenting system, but this would be similar with Discus or any other external commenting system.

All in all, I’m impressed… hopefully this will continue.