Adventures of Andrew Lee

You may have noticed the commenting system has changed. I took the plunge and switched comments over to a hosted service- Disqus, run by Daniel Ha and Jason Yan (two SoCal brothas who went throughY-Combinator). So far, it’s been rather nice. The first day I installed and sent in a request for help, Daniel responded that day to tell me how to solve my problem.

I was choosing between Disqus and Intense Debate because the others weren’t hosted solutions (no contest there). It was a tough decision, not just because I was choosing between ethnicity versus homeland :p. My literature review yielded a lot of different posts concerning which one to choose, including:

• this Wordpress Support post (one of the biggest hits on Google- and not flattering to Disqus), 
• Reverend Jim’s posts on experimenting with Disqus and ultimately choosing them, 
• and Webware’s amazing review of all the services (they chose Disqus at the end). 

It seemed my cursory look found mainly pro-Disqus articles (although Disqus always squeezed out the win) and no pro-Intense Debate articles that weren’t from investors. A literature review is never enough though, so researched and came up with the following reasons why I chose Disqus:

1. OpenID and Clickpass- Disqus has Clickpass. OpenID hasn’t really worked out that well. I tried to register for Mixx with my Yahoo OpenID and the system just didn’t work. I found a great solution through Clickpass (even receiving ‘Andrew’ username!) which became a simple tool for OpenID access on Disqus. Oddly enough, having Clickpass made me feel better about their OpenID support.
2. Big blog names- Although Intense Debate had the whole TechStarscontingent and Disqus had the YCombinator crowd, I was most impressed by the number of non-YC people who adopted the comment system:Scripting.com, the Harvard Crimson, a VC (to be fair, an investor) and last but absolutely not least… Fake Steve Jobs! I understand people don’t want to take sides in the blogosphere, but those who do without prejudice help a product. It also shows that these blogs are willing to grow with the system… which means a lot for timely features I’m hoping for in the future.
3. This graph below which shows the traffic (and adoption rates) for the commenting system. Using a system that a significant number of people use makes my blog easier to comment on.  

For now, I’m using Disqus… but the commenting system may not be permanent if Disqus does not deliver on promises:

1. A reliable service [no more of slowdowns please],
2. A forum I can put on one of my pages, and
3. An import tool for my old posts (the one advantage that I gave up because Intense Debate had an import tool).

Aside from that, I’m pretty happy, so feel free to Disqus here!