tyler butler

And We're Back! (With Comments!)

Wow, it’s been awhile. Almost a year since my last post. It truly is hard to believe. It’s been a busy year so far, but I’ve finally got some time to start posting again. I’ve got some interesting SharePoint posts coming down the pipe, plus a new site design I’m working on. It’s still in its early stages, but hopefully it’ll shape up pretty soon so I can get a sample up.

One thing you’ll notice if you’ve been here before is that I’ve managed to move the site into the 21st century by adding comments. I toyed with a few different comment management add-ins and ended up going with Disqus. It seems like it’ll suit my needs for now, and it was pretty straightforward to get integrated. Just added some script and markup to my master page and post page layout in SharePoint Designer. I’m not sure how I feel about the comments being stored separately from the site content, but it’s what I’ve got for now. It will make migration difficult if page URL’s change, which they almost certainly are when I change the architecture of the site in the next redesign. C’est la vie, I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it. Anyway, please go ahead and engage with me through the comments if you see something interesting on the site.

I should also note, for completeness, that SharePoint includes a blog template that supports comments. I, however, rolled my own site and didn’t use the blog template or features. There were lots of reasons for this that I won’t go into right now, but there are certainly some features that SharePoint blogs have that I also want, like comments and MetaWeblog support (which I added myself). For now, I’m stuck with what I’ve got. But like I said, there are some exciting new things coming with my site redesign.